The real problem isn't Donald Trump. It's the Republican party.

Let's assign some blame, shall we?

Two related things happened over the past 24 hours that caught my attention.

First, New York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, did an interview with CNN’s Abby Phillip. In it, Phillip played a clip of Donald Trump favorably quoting Russian President Vladimir Putin — badmouthing Joe Biden. Phillip then asked Malliotakis if she agreed with Trump.

“I don’t even know what it was about to be frank,” Malliotakis responded. “You don’t play the whole thing so it’s hard for me to say.”

Really? You don’t know whether the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee using a quote from the president of Russia to attack his political opponent is a good or a bad thing? Also, there was no more context. Just Trump quoting Putin!

Second, Politico’s Anthony Adragna asked Republican Senators about Trump’s recent comments that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Here are a few of their responses:

• “I obviously don't agree with that. I mean, we're all children of immigrants.” — West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito

• “[I] certainly wouldn't have said that.” — Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker

• “Unhelpful rhetoric.” — North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis

What you won’t find in there is a condemnation of Trump’s rhetoric. Or a demand (or even a request!) for him to either a) tone it down or b) apologize.

And those were the Senators who responded to Politico! Plenty of Senators didn’t!

This non-response is nothing new. As Politico noted:

If you’re new around here, reporters spent literally years badgering politicians on the Hill for their reaction to the latest outrage from then-president Trump, which they would insist they hadn’t seen.

Which, right.

The point is this: The problem isn’t really Donald Trump. It’s the Republican party that has (and continues to) enable him.

Here’s why.

Trump is Trump. He’s been this person his entire life. He does what is best for him — and what he can get away with.

It’s that second part that is absolutely critical here — “what he can get away with.”

Typically, a political party is a self-correcting operation. It generally polices its own — making sure that no one expresses views that are too far outside the political mainstream. Or, more accurately these days, views that make the broader party look bad.

Take former Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King. King made it a habit during his time in Congress of saying, well, racist things.

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” King asked during a New York Times interview in 2019.

While that was the worst of it, there was a LOT more. (The Times has a timeline of the many racist things King said.)

Eventually — and you could argue it took too long — the Republican party’s self-correcting mechanism kicked in. King was removed from his committees by the Republican House majority. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell suggested he find “another line of work.”

King wound up losing a primary the following year to a Republican who didn’t occasionally espouse sympathy for white nationalists.

The party had purged itself of a problem. King was gone. The malignancy had been removed.

The GOP did the same thing with now ex-Rep. George Santos. Again, it took forever. But Santos was becoming a massive liability, politically speaking. So Republicans, eventually, got rid of him.

Which brings me back to Trump.

Objectively — using election results as our guide — Trump has been bad for Republicans.

Yes, he won the presidency — against all odds — in 2016. But, in the 2018 election Republicans lost their House majority. In 2020, Trump lost the White House — the first incumbent since George H.W. Bush not to win a 2nd term. In 2022, Republicans lost control of the Senate while barely retaking the House majority.

You would think, then, that the self-correcting mechanism of the GOP would have long ago kicked in. That, from a purely politically pragmatic view, it no longer made (or makes) sense for Republican elected officials to defend (or ignore) Trump.

And yet, here we are. Trump continues to borrow rhetoric from Adolf Hitler and favorably quote authoritarians — aaaaand the GOP response is a collective shrug.

This is, simply put, a failure of Republican leadership. Republicans thought they could ignore Trump into nonexistence. That by refusing to pay attention to his 2016 campaign — even when it was obviously building momentum — that they could avoid dealing with what Trump represented. (What was that? A rising national populism fueled by fears of the other.)

All that did was allow Trump to grow stronger. And make it that much harder to stand against him. (Those who did, like Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake paid with their political careers.)

But, even as Trump grew, there were moments when Republicans could have at least tried to take their party back. The one that comes most immediately to mind is in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Both McConnell and House leader Kevin McCarthy denounced Trump’s conduct— only to back away from that criticism when it became clear that the base of the party wasn’t going to abandon the president.

Which, I think, gets to the root of the problem: Republican leaders (and the party’s rank and file elected officials) are terrified of their own base.

They know that trying to topple Trump — or even criticizing him!! — comes with a political price to pay. (Bashing Steve King or George Santos on the other hand was a total freebie for the average member of Congress.) Trump and the party base he commands WILL seek to exact revenge on you if you step out of line. And there are plenty of people — like Flake — whose careers were ended by their willingness to say “What the hell are we actually doing here?”

And so, Republicans continue to play this I-haven’t-seen-what-you-are-talking-about game — even as Trump’s rhetoric (and his plans for a 2nd term) grow more and more extreme.

Yes, that strategy likely keeps them in office. But at what price to the party — and the country?