Conservatives also believe themselves to be factory-default humans (with obvious demographic implications) and everyone else to be aberrations, errors, and defects in need of recall.
Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
It would be nice to believe that a felony conviction will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of American voters. That over the next 20 weeks the public will realize that Donald Trump is manifestly unfit for office.
No matter the era, conservatism is a story about how 50-year-old white guys thought everything was better back when they were 13, before the bad people came along and made it so things couldn’t stay the same forever. (This fetishized past used to be the 1940s or ‘50s. By updated math, civilization’s current peak was 1987.)