It has been a clarifying few days in terms of understanding the state of the Republican Party. While the destructive president has been out of the country and, for him, fairly buttoned down, a pair of events at home have brought into sharp relief the deteriorating state of the rest of the GOP, and it's not a pretty sight.

Both Rep.-elect Greg Gianforte's alleged assault upon reporter Ben Jacobs and the ceaseless promotion of the conspiracy theories around the death of former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich provide bright-line tests of the decency and sanity of the GOP and the right; a startling number of people failed them.

And while President Donald Trump took his weird and depressing act to the Middle East and Europe, it's hard not to see a corrosive connection between his reign atop the Grand Old Party and its decline into moral and intellectual depravity.

The presidency is a cancer on the GOP, to paraphrase John Dean's famous warning.

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And that's not simply the conclusion of this certified liberal Trump critic (though for what it's worth while I'm neither conservative nor Republican I believe that a sane, governing GOP is necessary for the healthy functioning of our political system); instead it's the inescapable conclusion one gets from reading and listening to smart conservatives willing to criticize the president and their party.

If you've been living under the proverbial rock, here's what you missed: Gianforte, the Republican nominee to fill the open House seat in Montana, reportedly went nuts and attacked journalist Jacobs Wednesday night after the latter asked him about the newly released Congressional Budget Office assessment of the House health care plan. His campaign issued an account of the incident which subsequent events, including the candidate's own post-election apology, proved to be fallacious. He was charged with misdemeanor assault and won his race anyway, keeping the reliably Republican House seat in the red column.

In the meantime, many conservative commentators went tribal, standing up for their guy and the principle that beating down reporters is cool.

But just as the Gianforte incident was a dismal test for some on the right, it afforded others yet another chance to issue clarion warnings about the decaying state of their once-grand party.

Here's Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign:

The Mt incident is one more example of the rotten, fetid and corrupt culture that has metastasized around an intellectually bankrupt GOP 1/3 — Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) May 25, 2017

And conservative movement. The rotten culture is derivative of an epic leadership deficit on the part of the GOP's elected leaders 2/3 — Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) May 25, 2017

And the voices of the conservative media complex.The disintegration of the conservative movement and GOP on a moral and values basis is .... — Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) May 25, 2017

Not just tragic but terrible for the country . The work of restoring trust , credibility and decency will take many years — Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) May 25, 2017

And here's Republican strategist Rick Wilson in the first of an 11-part tweet storm explaining something that should not require elucidation, that political violence is a bad thing:

1/ This Gianforte assault story is one of those moments where the cultural collapse of the GOP into the Trump Troll Party is captured — Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 25, 2017

The National Review's Mona Charen similarly lit into the decay surrounding her party: "The age of Trump has corrupted a great many people and shattered norms," she wrote. "Those whose moral compass has long since been stashed in the bottom drawer defending the indefensible piled on to applaud Gianforte's thuggishness. ... None of this is a gray area. You either uphold certain basic standards of decency or you don't."

She hits the nub; this is a product of the age of Trump, whether or not you see the president himself as a cause, effect or something in between in regard to the degradation of the political party and the culture. At minimum there's a symbiotic relationship between the Trump presidency and the coarsening of politics, especially on the right. "Respectfully, I'd submit that the president has unearthed some demons," GOP South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford told The Washington Post. "I've talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, 'Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can't I say whatever?' He's given them license."

Charlie Sykes, a conservative former talk-show host, whose forthcoming book, "How the Right Lost Its Mind" promises to be a must-read, told the Post: "Every time something like Montana happens, Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior."

The instincts to normalize, justify and rally around the partisan flag are destructive, especially at a time when the biggest political actor on the stage and those around him sit under an investigative cloud. If special counsel Robert Mueller finds wrong-doing, what will conservatives defend that they would have abjured without a second thought back in November or January?

And to what extent will odious conspiracy theories be foisted as a defense for what might have once been indefensible?

The Gianforte affair followed a flare-up of the Rich conspiracy theories, pushed by the despicable Sean Hannity of Fox News, with an assist from used-to-be serious person Newt Gingrich. In brief the fever-swamp right asserts that Rich – not Russian spies – was Wikipedia's secret source for the hacked DNC emails and was killed for it. And it's all being covered up. Hannity flogged this line of insanity mercilessly on his Fox News show in the wake of an incorrect and since-retracted report which gave the whole thing new life.

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This too brought rounds of condemnation from the still-reasonable quarters of the right, including most devastatingly Thursday night from Michael Gerson, who was George W. Bush's first chief speechwriter. Name-checking Hannity and talk radio impresario Rush Limbaugh, Gerson writes in his Washington Post column: "The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased."

He goes on:

Those conservatives who believe that the confirmation of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is sufficient justification for the Trump presidency are ignoring Trump's psychic and moral destruction of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Clinton, with a small number of changed votes, would have defeated Republicans. But Trump is doing a kind of harm beyond anything Clinton could have done. He is changing the party's most basic moral and political orientations.

And here's the thing: The infection is spreading from the outlandish to the mundane. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former member of Congress from Florida, inveighed epically against the GOP on his "Morning Joe" show over the lies they keep telling in defense of the American Health Care Act, also known as Trumpcare. "Why do the Republicans keep looking in the cameras and lie?" he asked. "Stop lying about it. We know you're lying about it; we're not stupid. And you Republicans in the House have been lying non-stop about what you're not going to cut and who's not going to lose health coverage."

From whence does this come? "I understand that Donald Trump lies all the time. And you're thinking he got away with it, right? And so you can get away with the lying? You can't." He concluded: "My party is going straight to hell, politically."

Like I said before, these aren't the conclusions of your friendly neighborhood lefty blogger. These are the legitimate warnings of some of the smartest people working to save the Republican Party; the GOP would do well to listen to them.

Update: Here's one more that I missed which is right on point. The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, who has become a must-read for anti-Trumpers of all political stripes, takes stock of a much larger number of occurrences this week and concludes:

Conventional wisdom says that Trump executed a hostile takeover of the GOP. What we have seen this week suggests a friendly merger has taken place. Talk radio hosts have been spouting misogyny and anti-immigrant hysteria for years; Trump is their ideal leader, not merely a flawed vehicle for their views. Fox News has been dabbling in conspiracy theories (e.g. birtherism, climate-change denial) for decades; now Republicans practice intellectual nihilism. Nearly every point of criticism raised against the left — softness on foreign aggressors, irresponsible budgeting, identity politics, executive overreach, contempt for the rule of law, infantilizing voters — has become a defining feature of the right.