As this story from The Economist acknowledges, every change of administration brings a new cast of characters, and with it comes a new slant to the politics of the party in power. Particularly when a party holds both Congress and the White House, there tends to be an alignment of axes, intended to make moving legislation through the pipe more likely. But with Republicans and Donald Trump, this alignment hasn’t represented just a change in the party’s positions or a tweak to underlying philosophies. The Republican Party has converted itself into a PR organization, whose sole reason for existence is to fluff the ego and further the ambitions of Donald Trump. Which is singularly problematic.

The organising principle of Mr Trump’s Republican Party is loyalty. Not, as with the best presidents, loyalty to an ideal, a vision or a legislative programme, but to just one man—Donald J. Trump—and to the prejudice and rage which consume the voter base that, on occasion, even he struggles to control. In America that is unprecedented and it is dangerous.

What The Economist is arguing isn’t that Trump’s policies are right or wrong. But that Trump’s policies aren’t being debated as policies. No one in the Republican Party is actually weighing Trump’s actions for the results, or holding him to promises, or speaking out against statements that simply don’t make sense. Instead the entire Republican Party has become an organization that turns on a dime, configuring itself to support whatever Trump said last, even if what he just said contradicts what he said weeks, days, or minutes before.

The bigger, more urgent concern is Mr Trump’s temperament and style of government. Submissive loyalty to one man and the rage he both feeds off and incites is a threat to the shining democracy that the world has often taken as its example.

Republicans paved the way for Trump by working to split the nation open on racial, religious and economic grounds. They created a campaign strategy that was based on generating fear and teaching American voters to other people, not just in distant lands, but in their home towns. They created not just a world in which immigrants, African Americans and liberals were to be regarded as ravening beasts, but where anyone who didn’t share that view was suspect. And now they have Trump, feeding off the hatred they created, and eating them in the process.