Not quite. They know what they want now, another TFG. Another authoritarian, maybe a figurehead (but he wouldn't know it). Maybe "president for life", so their positions would be secure, until he or one of their fellows the them under the bus. Trumpiness and loyalty to him is seen as a requirement for the party by the majority.
And all the ambitious Rs area already trying to be as Trumpy as they can.
Yes, the ones who hope to be in the running, or a number of them, anyway, are trying to keep their place there by appealing to the MAGA support base they hope to inherit from Trump when, for whatever reason, he's no longer a possible candidate.
When that day comes, though, when Trump doesn't control that part of US politics because he's no longer available as a candidate, then that changes the picture completely.
I don't see what's going to hold them together, I really don't.
At the moment, the Republicans are calibrated around their closeness, or otherwise, to Donald Trump. That's not so much an ideological divide between right and left as a divide between people who believe in representative democracy and the rule of law and those who don't.
Take Trump out of the picture, and that calibration is removed too. Why does any Republican politician need to worry about Trump any more? They need to worry about the power structure as it is, and as they hope to make it, at the point when Trump's approval or views have ceased to be a major issue.
There are clearly a lot of sane and competent Republicans in state government, as became clear after the elections and then the attempted coup. They can't be any happier about the antics of some of their number in Texas or Florida or Arizona than are the rest of the country, I would have thought, and now's the chance to start putting things right, since the MAGA mob can no longer be deployed against you.
This is what happens when the great khan of the Mongol hoard dies, and the hoard starts to split up into warring factions between the rival claimants among the princes, and they and their followers either head off their own way or start fighting amongst themselves.
The problem with authoritarian populist movements organised around support for the leader is that it's very difficult to plan for an orderly transition.
We've seen that many of these guys and gals aren't actually too worried about woke bureaucratic formalities like needing to hold free and fair elections and to accept the outcome, and command considerable numbers of supporters who are both armed and bonkers, so how do you think they're going to settle their coming dispute about who should inherit the US from King Donald?
