David French

And they have aggressively contested party control at the grassroots.

And this has happened all across Tennessee.

And so what's happened is that the MAGAverse, which used to be really, truly much more of an online phenomenon, if you weren't on Twitter, your experience of the Republican Party wouldn't be that dramatically different.

It's, you know, it's still all the same people.

Yes.

And then people like me who are seeing the rising weirdness of MAGA, who've been experiencing it through the threats and the intimidation.

And we sit there and we wave and this is going on because it hadn't penetrated to their lives yet.

We look like we're crazy people.

What are you talking about?

This is you're just nut picking.

You know, if people knew what that was, you know, you're just picking out the extremes and the fringes.

But what we saw was the building wave.

And now that wave has crashed all over the country.

And you have, say, for example, in Williamson County, Tennessee, where I used to live.

We had Republican civil wars year after year after year where you might say like the Moms for Liberty hyper MAGA faction is fighting the more establishment Republicans often in the most vicious of ways.

And so the thing that has kept the Republicans together even across all of that was really two things.

One was violence.

A shared affection for Trump.

I mean, nobody should say that virtually any Republican now is holding their nose to vote for Trump.

Very, very few.