No place was safe from these impulses—not even America’s least-populated and least-competitive state. For a long time, politicians in deep-red Wyoming had been happy to keep their distance from Washington’s daily dramas. But recently the state GOP has come to mirror the party’s national crack-up—a tense and volatile climate of censure, threats, and purges, where the dominant Trump faction is on the warpath against anyone perceived as stepping out of line. It’s become the kind of place where Dick Cheney’s own daughter could find herself run out of the party. Gore’s efforts to target those RINOs have left lingering aftershocks. For years, she had shown how much influence one committed, wealthy individual could have on a state’s civic institutions; now she was demonstrating just how much damage someone red-pilled by Trump could do to a state’s political culture.

There is something both tragic and familiar about a think-tank founder turning to the guy from Blackwater to help save the democratic process. This was the underlying delusion of the Trump era: that people with the most power in American life acted as if they had the least, and that the absence of evidence was taken as proof that something was being covered up. Trump’s movement was full of people whose worst fears drove them to empty their wallets for lost causes—from the Publix heir who??hundreds of thousands of dollars on the January 6 rally, to the supporters of the??GoFundMe border wall, to the people still desperately??so he can spend it at his private club. There was never a better time in conservative politics to be a hustler, and never an easier time to be a mark.