Donald Trump has conditioned the Republican Party well. 

When news broke that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had offered the former president the chance to testify before a grand jury investigating him, Republicans fell into a well-rehearsed routine. Anti-anti-Trumpism, which started as a coping mechanism for having a truly rotten person as their nominee and then president, has become a way of being for Trump’s party.

It’s not a new idea. Democrats developed a similar form of this auto-immune disease around the many moral and ethical misdeeds of Bill Clinton. By the end of Clinton’s second term and his impeachment for lying about his trysts with a 22-year-old White House intern, the blue team developed this kind of involuntary response. Republicans spent two years with a similar condition around Richard Nixon’s schemes to win the 1972 election and his lies to cover them up. 

But neither Nixon nor Clinton ever achieved the kind of conditioning Trump achieved with his fellow Republicans.