The Three Types of Republicans Donald Trump Created

Donald J. Trump departed the White House on Wednesday and left a Republican Party turned upside down.

Many Republicans tried not to let Mr. Trump change things, vowing never to vote for him or work in his administration — and to publicly shame those who did. Others bit their tongues and looked past his erratic behavior and racial grievances, justifying their indifference by pointing to the conservative policies he championed.

And there were others — comprising the most vocal segment of elected Republicans and a considerable portion of the voters who helped Mr. Trump win 10 million more votes than he did in 2016 — who are still with him, defying every last-straw prediction about the end of the iron grip Trump has on the G.O.P.

Here is a taxonomy of the types of Republicans Mr. Trump leaves in his wake.

Never Trumpers

They wrote open letters, boycotted the Republican National Convention twice, started podcasts and websites and raised millions of dollars for their efforts to defeat him.

The prospect of a Trump presidency was always unsettling to some Republicans who feared that his high self-regard and his nonchalance about the limits of political power were a recipe for disaster. But as his term wore on, this group came to include some surprising names like George Conway, whose wife, Kellyanne Conway, was one of the strategists who helped run Mr. Trump’s first campaign and remained loyal to him until the end of his presidency.

Mr. Conway found company with other Republicans whom the Trump wing of the party branded as “establishment” — a pejorative that recalled their work for previous presidential nominees like Senators John McCain and Mitt Romney. And their group, the Lincoln Project, worked for the past two years to convince Republican voters that Mr. Trump was a stain on their party.

The New ‘RINOs’

The term RINO used to mean “Republican in name only,” and it’s not a description that anyone was likely to use for Mark Brnovich, the conservative attorney general of Arizona.

That was before Mr. Trump and his loyalists redefined the term to mean any party official who dared to cross him.

Mr. Brnovich is a former Maricopa County prosecutor who has fought for Arizonans’ right to attend church during the pandemic and argued against relaxing rules for casting absentee ballots. Still, he drew the ire of Trump supporters when he made what he thought were two entirely reasonable decisions as his state’s chief law enforcement officer.

First, after investigating complaints about ballots that were supposedly ruined by bleeding marker ink, a conspiracy theory that became known as “Sharpie-gate” in the right-wing media, he determined there was nothing to it. Then, Mr. Brnovich refused to sign onto a far-fetched lawsuit by the state of Texas that called on the Supreme Court to throw out millions of votes in four swing states, including Arizona.

“It’s as simple as this,” Mr. Brnovich said in an interview. “It’s about the rule of law, not the rule of political expediency.”

Mr. Brnovich is not alone. Politicians whose names were once synonymous with the party’s hard right are now ridiculed as spineless and soft by Mr. Trump’s most faithful followers because they did not support his efforts to push state legislatures and Congress to declare Mr. Trump the winner.

In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are now being targeted for defeat by Trump loyalists after Mr. Trump attacked them for refusing to go along with him.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, daughter of the former vice president and liberal arch-villain Dick Cheney, now faces a challenge to her leadership post in the House Republican conference for her impeachment vote against Mr. Trump. Vice President Mike Pence, who has been so loyal to Mr. Trump that his critics mocked him as a subservient yes man, was attacked as a traitor by people who called for his execution after he refused to interfere with the formal certification of the election.

After four years of keeping most of their disagreements with Mr. Trump private, a growing number of Republicans have taken a stand against the nominal leader of their party. And they say they worry about setting a precedent for elected officials to disregard the law if it suits them politically.

“I’m very concerned that we’re using the sophisticated and subtle tools of the law to bend what should not be bent in a direction we find politically preferable,” said Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio. As office holders whose power over the electoral process is significant though often overlooked, Mr. Yost said that officials like him “have to accept that there are constraints on their preferred outcomes.”

Like Mr. Brnovich in Arizona, Mr. Yost was one of only seven Republican state attorneys general who did not join an amicus brief in support of the ill-fated case brought by their colleague in Texas, Ken Paxton. They were among the small but pivotal minority of state and local office holders whose opposition helped thwart Mr. Trump and the Republicans who aided him in an attempt to deny Joseph R. Biden Jr. his victory.

The system held, but just barely.

Trump Republicans

Nowhere was Mr. Trump’s hold on Republican lawmakers as evident as it was in Washington on Jan. 6 at the demonstrations leading up to the storming of the Capitol. Republican state legislators from Missouri, West Virginia, Tennessee and other states were among those who gathered to cheer on Mr. Trump. Mr. Paxton, the Texas attorney general, was also there.

In one episode that many Republicans said was especially troubling, a political arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association, known as the Rule of Law Defense Fund, paid for a robocall before Jan. 6 that called on “patriots like you” to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”

The existence of the call, which several Republican attorneys general have since disavowed and said they were unaware of, underscored the extent to which Mr. Trump’s die-hard supporters were leaning on elected officials to support his spurious fraud claims. Two people with direct knowledge of tense discussions that took place among the attorneys general after word of the call leaked said that a donor had demanded it and made a contribution contingent upon its release.

Capitol Riot Fallout

From Riot to Impeachment

The riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:

• • As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.
  • A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.
  • Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.
  • Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.
  • The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.

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