Everyone keeps talking about the "Republican civil war" - Cheney purged, Trump consolidating, loyalty tests everywhere. But there's no war. A war implies two sides fighting for control of the same thing. What we're actually seeing is a hostile takeover. The MAGA side won in about five years.

Yes, Cheney, Kinzinger, and a few others fought back. They had principles and stuck to them. That was admirable and completely ineffective. The party machinery, the donor base, the media ecosystem - it all bent toward Trump faster than anyone predicted. By the time you could even call it a "civil war," the outcome was already decided.

The real question isn't who's winning. It's whether the GOP that emerges from this looks anything like what it was. Because honestly, I'm not sure it matters much if you call yourself a Republican anymore if the price of admission is pretending the 2020 election was stolen, that January 6 wasn't that bad, and that pardoning Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes is fine because Trump says so.

I'm not saying this to gloat. I'm saying it because the institutional Republican Party - the thing that existed from Eisenhower through George W. Bush - is functionally dead. What's left is a personality cult with tax cuts. That's not a civil war outcome. That's a complete victory followed by a funeral nobody's attending.