If there’s anyone who can sympathize with Rep. Chris Collins, the first congressman to support Donald Trump, who is currently facing indictment for insider trading, it’s Michael Grimm. “He’s going to have a really, really difficult emotional time,” the retired Republican congressman, who was himself indicted on 20 counts of various crimes, told The New York Times on Thursday, when asked what he’d say to Collins. “He’s going to have to swallow every bit of it. And smile.” He went on, “Washington, as long as you’re riding high, they want to be your friend. And when you’re not, they don’t want to be anywhere near you. . . . And whether he knows it or not, a lot of Washington is going to look at him as a pariah.”

They might also look at him as unelectable, a realistic concern in a potential wave election that threatens to wipe out the Republican hold on Congress, particularly if Collins refuses to bow out of the race. But fear not, Grimm said—he himself had done what Collins aspires to do, running for re-election under indictment in 2012, and winning. (He eventually resigned after being convicted on one count of tax evasion, and is attempting to run again this year by embracing a pro-Trump platform.) Grimm continued to drop other pearls of wisdom, such as hiring the best lawyers, ignoring the media (but perhaps not threatening to “break them in half”), and pivoting his platform to talk about saving Trump from the Democrats. “If I were him, I would double down on the president needing us,” Grimm suggested.

It’s a strategy that, arguably, could only be effective in the Trump era, when the president could very well find himself reliant on Republican votes to save him from impeachment, and when the truth bends itself to suit whoever’s hands are most forceful. Grimm ultimately walloped his primary opponent by a whopping 10 points by taking advantage of a hyperpolarized, post-truth political clime, claiming he had been wrongfully convicted thanks to Democrats. At a rally in July, several of his supporters seemed convinced. “Every restaurant in America has illegals in the back. Are you kidding me?” Grimm-backer Lenny Di Roma told New York magazine. “This is from Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, and Loretta Lynch who wanted him gone.”

In today’s Republican Party, whose leader is seemingly impervious to the decades-long avalanche of criminal inquiries against him that concern everything from his private-sector work to his tax returns to the entire Russia investigation, criminal allegations aren’t nearly the death knell they once were. G.O.P. congressman Greg Gianforte was handed a deferred 180-day sentence after assaulting a reporter, but saw no backlash, even after Montana’s Democratic Party filed complaints with two ethics watchdogs. The plague, of course, emanates from the Trump orbit itself; former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is currently being tried for various charges related to his financial dealings, and Rick Gates, his onetime deputy who also played a role in the Trump campaign, has flipped to assist the prosecution, famously answering the questions, “Were you involved in any criminal activity with Mr. Manafort?” and “Did you commit any crimes with Mr. Manafort?” with a straightforward, “yes.”

Then there’s Michael Flynn, who has pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., and George Papadopoulos, who’s done the same (both are currently assisting in the Mueller investigation), not to mention Rob Porter, who worked in the White House while under accusations of domestic assault (allegations he has denied). And then there are the some half-dozen Trump appointees accused of ethics violations verging on the criminal—the latest, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, is under suspicion of stealing $120 million from his associates, allegations he, too, has denied. The laundry list stretches on, with a monotony that means those on it are difficult to distinguish from the crowd—a repetition that has protected them. “It’s very possible for Collins . . . to win this seat and re-election,” George Arzt, a longtime New York Democratic strategist, told the Times, citing the district’s heavy conservative bent. “Even under indictment.”

The same precedent is conspicuously absent on the Democratic side, where blue-state voters were quick to punish Democrat Bob Menendez, giving his relatively unknown primary opponent a massive boost following a criminal corruption trial that ended in a hung jury before the charges against Menendez were dropped. And it may have desensitized voters to the point that one of Democrats’ leading arguments in the 2018 midterms—the Republican-held government is hopelessly corrupt—could fall on deaf ears. In a recent letter to House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi wrote that they should draw a “sharp contrast” between their own party and the G.O.P.’s “cesspool of self-enrichment, secret money and special interests.” But others are worried the message won’t break through. “It’s become so rampant. You have a corrupt Cabinet, from one Cabinet member after the next. It’s not just Chris Collins,” Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos told Politico. “It’s this steady drip, drip, drip, and it’s one scandal on top of the next on top of the next. I think there’s a severe fatigue about this kind of behavior.”