The essence of Trumpism comes into yet sharper focus as the home stretch nears

The current election cycle is nearing its final phase. Both major parties have their presidential candidates. That's so locked in that it's not of much consequence that neither party will be able to hold anything approximating a normal convention this summer. 

Republicans are in quite a bind. Officially, the party has wholly given itself over to the Trump phenomenon, although internecine squabbles such as the House dustups surrounding Liz Cheney make clear that not everyone is on board. 

Still, the face that the party is obligated to present to the voting public at this late date is one of unwavering fealty to Donald Trump. Campaign material from pretty much any candidate for the national legislature or even state-level chambers is going to mention him prominently. 

This may keep the base, which is not going anywhere, fired up, but it makes for quite a self-inflicted problem more broadly, most recently evidenced by the fact that there are now no US Senate tossup races, and the Real Clear Politics average shows the Democrats getting 52 seats to the Republicans' 48. 

What's happening? For one thing, most of the country understands that while it doesn't much like the measures that have to be taken to address the coronavirus - masks, social distancing, pauses in state reopenings, quandaries over how or even if to reopen schools - they are necessary, given that neglect of them is shown to exacerbate its spread.

Most citizens admire the likes of Doctors Fauci and Birx and trust their expertise. They feel comfortable heeding such figures' admonitions. 

A recent pattern of Trumpists unabashedly expressing diametrically opposite takes on the matter of public-health expertise demonstrates a new level of tone-deafness for that movement. 

Sinclair Broadcast Group has made an eleventh-hour decision to "rework a segment" set to air on a cable show hosted by Eric Bolling (one of the long line of former Fox News personalities who had to leave that network over sexual-harassment scandals). The segment was going to suggest that Fauci has actually created the coronavirus. It was going to include an interview with Judy Mikovitz, who was prominently featured in the video "Plandemic" which went viral for a few hours last spring and then was abruptly and thoroughly discredited. 

Seems Bolling and Sinclair are now looking at how to come up with a more "balanced" approach to their subject.

Speaking of Fox, two of its biggest current stars are also peddling rank coronavirus-related conspiracy.

Tucker Carlson sees the recent tone of the nation's pandemic conversation as a nefarious Democrat plot:

Tucker Carlson said Thursday that coronavirus safety guidelines were really a plot to promote Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign against Donald Trump. (Watch the video above.)

In a rambling segment that attempted to build his kooky case for a conspiracy to make America so unhappy that it would back the presumptive Democratic nominee, the Fox News host called Democrats “radicals” who “will do anything for control.”

“Democrats understand that the unhappier Americans become, the more likely they are to win,” Carlson said on his show. “Unhappy people want change, it is not complicated. So every ominous headline about the state of the country makes it more likely that Donald Trump will lose his job. The more that people suffer, the greater Joe Biden’s advantage. Democrats have a strong incentive, therefore, to inflict as much pain as they can, and that’s what they are doing.”

He even called Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert known for his level-headed guidance as a White House task force member, “capricious and transparently political.”

In a conversation with Eric Trump, Jesse Watters notes that Twitter has cracked down on several thousand accounts related to QAnon, and goes on to say, "Q can do some crazy stuff, with the Pizza[gate] stuff and the Wayfair stuff, but they've also uncovered a lot of great stuff when it comes to Epstein and when it comes to the deep state." He and Eric then proceed to indulge in some whataboutism, mentioning that Antifa, Adam Schiff and JerryNadler have all posted some wild content on Twitter. Eric said that "some 22-year-old dweeb in Silicon Valley" holds the key to this year's presidential election.

The people mentioned above have been in the Very Stable Genius's thrall for some time, in some cases from the get-go.

We're still seeing saddening cases of figures who had resisted his power to recruit into the cult until more recently, such as Nikki Haley, who, even as recently as her stint as UN ambassador, was publicly parting ways with him.

She has now deemed wholesale sycophancy to be the advisable political course:

Nikki Haley

@NikkiHaley

We know how much 

@realDonaldTrump

 wanted to have a blowout convention.Proud of the selfless leadership he has shown in cancelling the convention. He has a great story to tell on how he turned our economy & foreign policy around. We look forward to sharing it in the next 100 days!

Someone really needs to stage an intervention. 

There are some really old-school Republicans who are no longer politically active, but do not care to sully the party's legacy with what it has mutated into:

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute formally asked the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to stop using the 40th president's name and image to raise money.

The request came in response to a fundraising appeal sent from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the RNC, offering two commemorative coins, one engraved with Reagan's image and the other with that of President Donald Trump to anyone who donates $45 or more for Trump's reelection. The email was "signed" by Trump.

Of course, it was a colossal mistake for the GOP to ever take Donald Trump seriously, much less let him bully the party into treating him differently from other candidates in 2016. The list of disappointments who went from resolute opposition to his phenomenon to opportunistic and craven hitching of their wagons to it is long indeed.

But such people are not stupid. That they are Kool-Aid-besotted is the only explanation I can see why they are conducting themselves as they are rather than running for the exits and plotting how they are going to maneuver through the disaster that awaits as this year concludes.