The Detail Is in the Devils

They fed the beast. Now it’s eating them back.

They say the devil is in the details. But in today’s GOP, it’s the devils—plural—lurking not in the margins, but in the open: in silence, in slogans, in the slow unraveling of what once passed for principle.

This wasn’t a hostile takeover. It was a willing merger—a man obsessed with power, and a party that mistook proximity to it for purpose. The GOP thought it could ride the Trump tiger, feeding on rage and spectacle while keeping its hands clean. Trump, in turn, needed their infrastructure and complicity. Together, they created something new: not quite a party, not quite a cult—an organism designed not to govern, but to survive.

the party thought
it could ride the beast
and walk away unbitten.
that it could feed him fury
and leash him with ambition,
but the leash was never theirs.
it was knotted
tight
around their own throats.

Now, 87 days into his second term, it is devouring itself.

Republican leaders once convinced themselves they were using him—a means to tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judges. But Trump was never a vessel. He was an accelerant. The leash they thought they held was never theirs. It was always wrapped around their necks.

He no longer pretends. His administration jails legal residents, defies court rulings, considers outsourcing American prisoners. It slashes healthcare for children, cancels public health programs, and threatens universities with extinction for ideological disobedience. This isn’t smaller government. It’s weaponized cruelty.

Once, the party claimed to stand for law and order. Now it cheers lawlessness in the name of sovereignty. Once, it claimed to defend free speech. Now it censors dissent and hunts protest. Once, it claimed moral clarity. Now it trades in humiliation and fear. Hypocrisy isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.

This isn’t drift. It’s design.

Moderates have gone quiet. Conservatives with spines have been exiled or absorbed. More than 20,000 IRS staff have resigned. Whole departments have been hollowed out or repurposed as instruments of vengeance. The price of staying is submission. The cost of leaving is irrelevance.

Trump doesn’t serve the party. He consumes it. He’s built his own ecosystem—media, money, myth. He doesn’t need their permission. Only their obedience. When Republicans hesitate, they’re mocked, threatened, replaced. Those who remain parrot his lines and pray for proximity. Some still hope to outlive him. Others to inherit his base. But Trump has no heirs. Only imitators. He builds nothing. He burns everything.

I once believed political parties could fall short and still stand for something. That belief is harder to hold now.

So what happens when the organism turns on itself?

Is this the GOP’s final chapter—or the larval stage of something worse? The silence of institutions, the normalization of cruelty, the strategic erosion of dissent—these aren’t anomalies. They’re methods. And they’re working.

They thought they could use him. That was the original sin.

Now the beast they nurtured has two mouths: one that feeds the base, and one that feeds on the truth. Locked in a grotesque embrace, each side devours the other—grinding down legacy, legitimacy, and the last threads of democratic restraint.

And in the end, it won’t matter who swallowed whom—only what we allowed to be devoured.