Asked about Trump’s ties to Russia, Rep. Trey Gowdy, who spent nearly two years and millions of dollars leading one of five congressional investigations into the 2012 Benghazi attack, which also remains under investigation by the F.B.I., told CNN, “Isn’t that what Bob Mueller is doing?”

Trump’s history of shady business dealings is well known—the president’s real-estate transactions with Russian billionaires and numerous bankruptcies raised red flags long before he was voted into office. But Republicans’ “see no evil, hear no evil” policy is by now a familiar theme: Back in 2016, the president’s affinity for Russia was so obvious that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly joked behind closed doors that Trump was being secretly paid by Vladimir Putin. (McCarthy’s jest hewed a little too close to the truth for comfort: House Speaker Paul Ryan immediately cut the conversation off and swore the room to secrecy.) Shortly after Trump took office, former Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz released an agenda that did not include plans to investigate any of Trump’s potential conflicts of interest. When pressed, Chaffetz said he would “deal with the situations with Donald Trump one at a time,” and that he would “not . . . personally target the president.” More recently, Republican lawmakers have rallied around an error-riddled memo published by Rep. Devin Nunes’s office that claims the F.B.I. wrongfully surveilled members of the Trump campaign.

The G.O.P.’s partisan blind spot to Trump’s behavior extends beyond the Russia probe, as well. “Every morning, I wake up in my office and scroll Twitter to see which tweets I will have to pretend that I didn't see later,” Ryan joked during a gala in New York, seeming to acknowledge how he and other Republicans ignore the president’s outbursts. They have sidestepped lingering ethics questions about his Washington, D.C., hotel and other business properties that serve lobbyists, foreign diplomats, and other influence peddlers across the world. All of which makes sense, given the massive rubber stamp in Trump’s hand. Whether or not Trump colluded with Russians, wittingly or unwittingly, to win the 2016 election is of little consequence to the party that benefited—especially when Trump, a political neophyte with few concrete ideas of his own, is willing to sign almost any legislation that Congress puts on his desk. Earlier this year, amid a flurry of debate over immigration reform, the president instructed Republicans to send him a bill—any bill—and he would get it done. “You guys are going to have to come up with a solution [for DACA], and I'm going to sign that solution,” Trump said during a bipartisan meeting, as the details of the policies being discussed seemed to go over his head. For a Republican Party enjoying majority control of Congress for the first time in ten years, that kind of power is more important than asking questions about things they don’t care to know.