The Republican Party has now fully embraced the mindset of Timothy McVeigh

The events of this past week may have been the most instructive in America’s political history. Although it is not clear whether new revelations concerning Donald Trump’s apparent mishandling or outright theft of classified American nuclear intelligence (for purposes that remain murky, and in details that are still breaking at the time of this writing) will give Republicans some pause in their knee-jerk and vehement condemnation of the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, what they’ve already done speaks volumes about what the GOP has become.

In the space of a week, the mask has completely dropped: Far from simply alluding (in “dog whistles” or other stochastic methods) to acts of retaliatory violence against their fellow Americans for imagined and baseless grievances, nearly all Republicans, eagerly and collectively—and in the space of just a few hours—have fulsomely embraced and advocated the values, rhetoric, and tactics of one of America’s most loathed domestic terrorists. He’s the one chiefly responsible for the single most deadly act of violence ever perpetrated by an American citizen: Timothy McVeigh.