The (radical) state of the Republican Party today and tomorrow

Charlie Pierce states his version of the reality that the Republican Party is a rightwing, anti-democracy party (The Republican Party Went Around the Bend Before Trump, and It Will Stay There After Esquire Politics Blog 11/02/2020):

El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago's "populism" ended on election night in 2016. Since then, he's been a bog-standard conservative Republican president*, albeit an unusually crude and stupid one. And this election stopped being about "personality" when the body count from the pandemic hit 50,000. At that point the election became about survival—literally, in the case of the public health emergency, and (somewhat) figuratively as regards the institutions of democratic republican government. The president* has led a willing Republican Party into a situation in which it is the party of doom and death. It was headed in that direction for three or four decades anyway, but this president* put it on rocket skates. The reckoning is here. [my emphasis in bold]

And he has a prediction very solidly based in empirical experience on what the Republican Party will do after a Trump loss:

The odds tell us that, first, the Republicans will do everything they can to obstruct even the mildest and most moderate proposals coming from a Democratic president. Then, in 2022, the Republicans will empower a new generation of crazies to run for Congress and many of them will win. By 2024, their nominating contest will consist of a design competition to create Trumpism with a human face.

They are not going to give up on the crackpottery of supply-side economics. They are not going to give up on voter suppression. They are not going to give up on abortion or misogyny. They haven't spent 40 years salting the federal judiciary with larval Scalias to do any of that. They should, of course, but the prion disease has robbed the party of its higher executive functions. It exists now in a feral state of cannibal appetites, and there's no escape from it except for choices it can no longer make. [my emphasis]

Also, the Trump crime family will still be around after the election even with Joe Biden as President. (David Roth, How Don Jr. Became the Future of Trumpism New Republic 10/27/2020):

Trumpism’s most fundamental attribute is that it cannot ever change. As it exists up and down the culture, Trumpism is in its various guises a hair-trigger fan community and a deliriously servile online cult, a shared metonym for a suite of musty grievances and a television programming strategy, a gaudily gilded aesthetic sense and a perverse family business. But for all the things it is, Trumpism is not complicated. It is a graceless, gloating, recursive celebration of power, an endless, dreary party thrown in power’s own honor, emceed by Donald Trump—the same Donald Trump who will, in what promises to be a highlight, be presented later in the evening with the Donald Trump Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, by none other than President Donald Trump himself. [my emphasis in bold]

The fantasy promoted and maybe sometimes even believed by establishment Democrats that "the fever will break" in the Republican Party and they will suddenly morph into those fabled creatures known as "Eisenhower Republicans" is wrong:

But while Trump is the most important person in Trumpism, he is also an avatar for something both greater and smaller — a long spate of complaints and a certain sour cast of mind, a relentless and unappeasable grievance, and an idea of power that is wholly negative, that exists only to blame and punish and deny. It’s a liberation movement, of sorts, at least in the sense that Trump’s bottomless demand for more has empowered an untold number of similarly unappeasable Americans who consider themselves entitled to the same service. The urge at the heart of Trumpism won’t go away with Trump, and his protracted victory celebration won’t necessarily end even if he loses in November. [my emphasis]

But first we have to get past the election and Trump's planned coup-from-above, which Digby Parton describes in Trump may plan to declare victory on Tuesday — and hold rallies after Election Day Salon 11/02/2020.

Michael Kruse has done a useful roundup of Trump's own style in 45 Self-Evident Truths About Donald Trump Politico 10/29/2020. Trump will still be President for at least the next two and a half months.