https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/mitt-romney-retiring-senate-trump-mcconnell/675306/

But as Romney surveyed the crop of Republicans running for Senate in 2022, it was clear that more Hawleys were on their way. Perhaps most disconcerting was J. D. Vance, the Republican candidate in Ohio. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told me. They’d first met years earlier, after he read Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Romney was so impressed with the book that he hosted the author at his annual Park City summit in 2018. Vance, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family in Appalachia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, had seemed bright and thoughtful, with interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism. Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate, and re­invented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left” and denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” The speed of the MAGA makeover was jarring.

Yeah. I had been taken in by Vance, too.

Romney, like McCain and Cheney, were people I often disagreed with violently, but which I could still respect for their integrity. It appears the Republican Party has been systematically rooting these people from their ranks. The modern GOP now seems to completely populated by three types of political animals. The crazies who actually believe the lies, the cowards who are afraid to challenge them, and the cynical who are willing to go along because they only see what’s in it for them.

And I don’t see any hope coming from the Democratic side, either. They are the weak and corrupt remnants of our own fading Weimar Republic.