You can learn a lot about a person from their friends.

They are major pricks themselves, so they don't see the need to fix it.

Interestingly, from what I can tell from my family, “non-MAGA” republicans are actually less likely to break with Trump over stuff. They’ll say they don’t like the man, but then they’ll shrug off criticism of him. This actually makes sense. MAGA drink the cool aid, but non-MAGA Republicans view themselves as rational. So they convince themselves that he’s not that bad.

It’s a pretty common cognitive dissonance reduction technique. In college I learned about a study where participants were told they were going to go eat a bug for market research. One group was offered $1 to tell the “market researcher” that they liked it. Another group was offered $20 for the same thing.

Afterwards, the people who paid them asked if they really did like it. The majority of the people paid $20 admitted they didn’t actually like the bug, but said they did because they’d been paid. But a significant number of the people who were paid $1 told the person paying them they actually did like the bug. People generally consider themselves honest, and view $1 as not enough to make them compromise their honesty, so they convinced themselves they really did like the bug after all.

Non-MAGA Republicans have spent so much time convincing themselves they didn’t fuck up or compromise their morals by voting for Trump that they support him even if they claim not to. Even if they’ve said for years they don’t like him but voted for him for whatever single issue they vote on, often abortion.

(Note, I am in no way an expert on any of this and am probably grossly oversimplifying.)

Because it's not an archive link, it's the same link...

FWIW - If I use “Reader” mode in iOS (I’m sure there’s an android equivalent) I get the whole article.