Photos: The Associated Press

If the Democrats held the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, President Donald Trump probably would have been impeached by now. Former White House ethics czars Richard Painter and Norm Eisen have stated there's already "more than sufficient" evidence of obstruction of justice, which was one of the articles of impeachment drawn up for both President Richard Nixon and President Bill Clinton.

But the Republicans are in charge in Congress, and so the likelihood of Trump being impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate falls somewhere between small and nil. This has led Vanity Fair magazine to put together the “Definitive Guide to the GOP Insiders Enabling Donald Trump.” It makes for an illuminating, if dispiriting, read. But it’s not actually definitive, offering up only a handful of GOPers. (The magazine is going with a very strict definition of “insiders.”) So we provide our own list of influential Trump enablers, taking VF’s guide as a starting point and adding more names to the mix.

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Michael Bloomberg

The former New York City mayor and former Republican considered an independent run for president last year but abandoned the idea after determining he had no chance at winning. The billionaire businessman has been sharply critical of Trump, but in recent weeks he's grown weary of the Resistance -- that is, the semi-organized push to get Trump out under any circumstances. He's called for anti-Trump activists to accept their fate rather than continue to protest and gum up the levers of government. "That's my country. That's my kids and grandkids," Bloomberg said this month. "You have to make it work. We have an election -- whoever wins, you got to get behind."

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Ben Carson

Donald Trump viciously attacked Carson early in the primary season, calling into question the retired neurosurgeon’s sanity and suggesting Carson was susceptible to uncontrollable violent rage. But when Trump’s long-shot campaign took off and Carson’s longer-shot campaign fizzled, Carson jumped on Trump’s bandwagon. He insisted there “are two Donald Trumps” and called him a “special man.” His support helped make Trump palatable to evangelical Christians who had been turned off by Trump’s antics and biography. Trump rewarded Carson by making him the secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

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Jason Chaffetz

The Utah Republican, who just gave up his House seat to join Fox News, was one of Hillary Clinton’s most persistent tormentors during the 2016 campaign, digging into the Democratic nominee’s email-server scandal and other Clinton controversies. But Chaffetz didn’t use his House oversight committee chairmanship to look into Trump’s various financial conflicts of interest and other questionable behavior, and for months he shrugged off the growing Russia election-meddling scandal. When asked why he decided to leave Congress just six months after being elected to another two-year term, he said it’s time to “get off the crazy train.”

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Chris Christie

Before the “Bridge-gate” scandal hobbled him, the New Jersey governor was one of the front-runners for the 2016 GOP nomination. He tried to recover his mojo by attacking Trump (and, famously, Marco Rubio). He said the real-estate developer and reality-TV star acted like a “13-year-old,” adding: “What’s that tell you about what we can expect if things go sideways when you go into the Oval Office?” But once Christie’s campaign collapsed, he quickly became the highest profile Republican leader to back Trump. He was a key adviser for Trump during the general election, and Trump showed his gratitude by tossing Christie from his transition team and keeping him out of his White House cabinet.

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Ted Cruz

The Texas senator proved to be Trump’s strongest challenger in the 2016 Republican primaries. Which means Trump hit him hard, labeling him “Lyin’ Ted,” threatening to “spill the beans” on his wife (whatever that meant) and, most bizarre of all, falsely connecting Cruz’s father to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Cruz responded by calling Trump a “sniveling coward” and refusing to endorse him during his speech at the GOP convention. But the senator eventually came around. Perhaps hoping to win GOP power-brokers’ favor the next time he runs for president, he made calls on Trump’s behalf during the campaign and has sidestepped questions about Trump’s behavior as president.

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Bob Dole

The 1996 Republican presidential nominee, a giant of the Senate during his long career, became known for trying to make the Republican Party more inclusive. Though he had an acerbic wit, Dole was a gentleman who played by the rules and expected others to do the same. (In his concession speech in ’96, he called President Bill Clinton “my opponent, not my enemy -- and I wish him well.”) For this reason, many GOP insiders assumed Dole would keep his distance from Trump, an outsider who gleefully broke every rule in the book. Dole didn’t. "I think Trump's going to make a great president," he said at the convention.

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Trey Gowdy

Like Chaffetz, the South Carolina congressman used his position in the House to investigate and hector Hillary Clinton throughout her time as a presidential candidate. He led the Select Committee on Benghazi and relished questioning Clinton in an open session. He has refused to treat Trump the same way. During House Intelligence Committee hearings he has steered away from the question of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, focusing instead on intelligence community leaks to the press. The former prosecutor is now the new chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and, according to USA Today, "he plans to turn the committee away from its investigation of Russia meddling in the 2016 election."

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Lindsey Graham

The respected South Carolina senator was one of Trump’s most-persistent critics during the 2016 presidential primaries, at one point calling him a “jackass.” But Vanity Fair pointed out that “as Trump’s nomination became inevitable, Graham began to soften. He made a conciliatory call to Trump, who tweeted about the conversation: "Senator Lindsey Graham called me yesterday, very much to my surprise, and we had a very interesting talk about national security, and more!” Graham has tried to have it both ways ever since, criticizing Trump when the president says something stupid (he insisted Thursday that Trump should apologize for his rude and sexist tweet about MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski), but enthusiastically carrying water for the president on policy issues and batting away questions about impeachment.

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Newt Gingrich

The former Speaker of the House backed Trump during the 2016 campaign, even putting himself forward as the ideal vice-presidential running mate. Trump picked Mike Pence instead for veep, and he didn’t even offer Gingrich a cabinet position. Still, the Georgia Republican has been Trump’s most aggressive defender on the Russia scandal. He recently tweeted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is “now clearly the tip of the deep state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency.”

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Rudy Giuliani

The former New York City mayor was an early Trump supporter in 2016 and proved to be one of the GOP nominee’s most-aggressive and effective campaign surrogates. He wanted to be Trump’s secretary of state, but that didn’t happen. He’s nevertheless remained in the president’s corner: Giuliani recently said he didn’t believe fired FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before Congress. Anti-Trump conspiracy theorists insist he’s feeling pressure from investigators looking into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

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Nikki Haley

Early on in the 2016 campaign cycle, Haley criticized Trump’s sexism and bull-in-a-china-shop approach, becoming a leading voice among Republican women who were uncomfortable with the unorthodox candidate’s behavior. Then Trump won the nomination, and the South Carolina governor, long seen as a rising star in the Republican Party, joined the Trump band. She is now ambassador to the United Nations.

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James Mattis

Even Democrats cheered when Trump nominated highly respected retired Gen. James Mattis as Defense secretary. Sen. Richard Blumenthal told Mattis during the general’s confirmation hearing: "Your appreciation for the costs of war in blood, treasure and lives, and the impact on veterans afterward, will enable you to be a check on rash and potentially ill-considered use of military force by a president-elect who perhaps lacks that same appreciation." That may have been wishful thinking on Blumenthal’s part. Trump has made numerous rash and ill-considered foreign-policy statements during his first months in office, including calling into question whether the U.S. truly backs NATO’s collective defense mission, and in response Mattis has publicly kept quiet.

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John McCain

The 2008 GOP presidential nominee was the first high-profile scalp Trump scored during the 2016 presidential primaries. He mocked McCain’s time as a POW in a North Vietnamese prison, saying: “I like people who weren’t captured.” McCain did his best to avoid criticizing Trump during the campaign, finally refusing to take questions about his party’s presidential nominee. With his re-election to the Senate secured in November and, at 80, unlikely to run for office again, McCain is in prime position to make his true feelings known about Trump. For the most part, however, he’s continued to demur. He’s even tried to downplay alleged Trump-Russia connections, cutting off Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris during her questioning of U.S. Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions at a recent congressional hearing. McCain appears fully aware of the costs of defending Trump. Asked Thursday about the president’s sexist tweet about Mika Brzezinski, he said he was “embarrassed” and “regrets it.”

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McCarthy, with Speaker Paul Ryan in the background

Kevin McCarthy

In a private meeting of congressional Republicans last year, the House majority leader said -- perhaps as a joke, perhaps not -- “there’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” (California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a notorious defender of Russian President Vladimir Putin.) McCarthy added: “Swear to God.” A tape of the conversation eventually leaked out, but McCarthy has refused to comment on it.

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Mitch McConnell

The GOP’s senate leader is arguably the foremost partisan in Washington. Early on in the Barack Obama presidency, McConnell said, “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Now he’s doing everything he can to make sure Trump gets through a full term and achieves a second one, even though he does not see eye-to-eye with the president on many issues. Writes Vanity Fair: “McConnell’s track record of disagreeing with Trump but continuing to support him is impressive."

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Devin Nunez

No Trump backer in Congress has embarrassed himself or herself more thoroughly than the California congressman. As head of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes tried to both substantiate Trump's false claim that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower and short-circuit the investigation into a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. The result: He was forced to recuse himself from the committee's Russia investigation, and the House Ethics Committee released a statement in April that "Nunes may have made unauthorized disclosures of classified information, in violation of House Rules, law, regulations, or other standards of conduct." Nunes has reportedly recused himself in name only and continues to play a key role in the committee's Russia investigation.

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Mike Pence

The vice president has kept a low profile, but he has remained Trump’s most stalwart ally. Vanity Fair insists Pence’s “personal agenda is a vaulting ambition somewhat masked by a placid half-smile and a demeanor of practiced sincerity.” When Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Pence dutifully went out and defended the president’s action, insisting the firing had nothing to do with the bureau’s investigation of alleged Trump campaign-Russia links. The next day Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired Comey in part because of the bureau’s investigation of alleged Trump campaign-Russia connections. Pence calls Trump a “good man.”

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Reince Priebus

The White House chief of staff and longtime establishment Republican has tried to bring order to Trumpworld, with little apparent success. Vanity Fair labels him “The Stooge” for buying into the Trump cult. Priebus says the president is a "winner" and admits he has made only a mild attempt to stop him from viciously attacking opponents or anyone who gets under his skin. “I have encouraged him,” he told the New York Times, “to constantly offer grace to people that he doesn’t think are deserving of grace.”

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Mitt Romney

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee led the charge against Trump in the spring of 2016. “If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished,” he said in a nationally televised speech. "Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University.” It was an impressive speech, but it didn’t work. And after Trump nailed down the nomination, Romney disappeared from the scene. He resurfaced after the election when he enthusiastically put himself forward for secretary of State, thus helping legitimize the “phony” in the eyes of some “Never Trump” Republicans. Trump publicly dangled the State job before Romney, forcing the former Massachusetts governor to smile through interview dinners with him, and then gave the job to Rex Tillerson. Romney tried to piece back together his newly shredded dignity, insisting he was “honored” to have been considered for the job.

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Paul Ryan

Trump’s verbal miasma on policy and his wink-and-nod approach to white nationalists made the Speaker of the House uncomfortable during the 2016 Republican primaries. “I’m not there yet,” he said last summer when asked if he would be endorsing the former reality-TV star. He got there, and, in service to the House Republican agenda, he has backed Trump through thin and thinner ever since. When questions arose about whether Trump’s behavior toward then FBI Director James Comey constituted obstruction of justice, his response was that of a classic enabler: Trump, he said, didn’t know what he was doing. “The President's new at this,” he declared. “He's new to government. So he probably wasn't steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI and White Houses. He's just new to this."

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What are we to make of the president’s powerful backers? Ultimately, that will be for history to decide. “His enablers will get no asterisk,” Vanity Fair writes. “They will be treated with the special contempt reserved for those who acted knowingly and cravenly, with eyes wide open.”

Check out VF's guide.

-- Douglas Perry