George W. Bush understood the Reactionary/PBP deal as well as anyone; after all, he promoted anti-gay referenda in several key states in order to goose reactionary turnout in order to save himself and his regressive tax cuts in 2004. In many respects, his presidency was a disaster, both for his party and for the country as a whole. But while Bush could employ cynical partisan tactics, you couldn’t reasonably call him a vandal; he was genuinely interested in policy and good governance, however mistaken he might have been in the execution.
That all changed with the GOP’s response to the Great Recession. Mitch McConnell, as the de facto leader of the party, had a choice to make: would he work with the Democrats to try to pull the country out of its deepening hole, or would he just do whatever it took to regain power? As we know, he picked the latter. Worse, it became clear to him that the best course for the GOP was not to provide constructive policy alternatives to improve the lot of Americans as a whole, but to try to destroy the very idea that America could be governed effectively by anyone, even his own party. Having killed off the idea of a successful federal government, McConnell could then promote tax and regulatory changes in order to transfer money and power to his donor class, who, in his view, were the only people capable of actually running the country.
And so, from 2009 on, the GOP has been a party of vandalism: debt ceiling crises; government shutdowns; conspiracy theories; blatant abuses of traditional norms; lost civility; and, finally, an attempted insurrection. Trump wasn’t an outlier in this process; he was its logical outcome. Has McConnell learned his lesson? The bulk of the evidence since January says no.