Given a second opportunity to revise and extend his original, ignominious response to the deadly, racist violence in Charlottesville last weekend, President Donald Trump instead descended to the lowest point of his squalid presidency. Flanked in the Trump Tower lobby by smiling cabinet officials, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (and as Chief of Staff John Kelly looked on glumly), Trump volunteered praise for some of the white supremacists who rallied around a monument to the confederacy.

“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” the president said. “Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now. You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.” Referring to the “Unite the Right” demonstrators, Trump said, “You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.” He added, “You also had some very fine people on both sides.”

It may not have dawned on Chao, as Trump’s comments ended, just how severe the backlash would be. Asked by reporters afterward to comment on Trump’s ongoing feud with her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Chao remarked, “I stand by my man. Both of them.”

The right answer would have been: “The president’s feelings about my husband are of no concern to me any longer, because I resign.” That’s the only morally acceptable conclusion at this point for any senior Trump officials who don’t consider themselves tribunes for white nationalism. The related issue of the GOP Congress’ complicity in Trump’s wide-ranging misconduct is an important one, but it is inherently more complex than the question of continued service in the executive branch—as are most legislative decisions, dependent almost by definition on large-scale collective action.

These collective action problems can be hard to resolve, but nearly every solution arises from cues members of Congress take from influential figures outside of their branch of government. There is a small but powerful cohort of presidential advisers and cabinet members who will happily leak to the press that they continue to serve to protect the country from Trump’s unfitness for office. They want to be seen, in Axios’ words, as “The Committee to Save America.”