The Republican President of the United States is now directly implicated in federal crimes pertaining to his own election. In response to these revelations, the Republican administration is developing, or more accurately stumbling into, a political response: They will presume that Republican voters will not care about the lawbreaking if their party leader tells them not to.
The White House is adopting what one official termed a “shrugged shoulders” strategy for the Mueller findings, calculating that most GOP base voters will believe whatever the president tells them to believe.
You will note that this is not a legal strategy. Federal prosecutors will not give a damn what Donald Trump's message to the base is; whatever evidence they have collected that has allowed them to make confident statements of the president's involvement in multiple crimes will not be undone because Captain Blowhard launched into another Twitter tirade blaming invisible gnomes for conspiring against him.
Instead, Trump's team is calculating that they can pull off a coup against the rule of law by somehow making it politically untenable for Trump to be prosecuted for committing those crimes. And they seem quite certain that Republican lawmakers, from Mitch McConnell to everyone else, will adopt this same plan.
As with nearly every report that outlines the Republican descent into lawless authoritarianism, most specifically fascism, Steve Bannon is available to give his own thoughts. He believes, he tells the Washington Post, that "Democrats are going to weaponize the Mueller report" and that the Criminal in Chief cannot "trust the GOP to be there when it counts." Again, breaking federal laws and being caught doing it is considered entirely in political terms; it is not what happened or what federal prosecutors will report that is of issue, but whether the Republican Party, as a whole, will be successful in either covering up those crimes or convincing the public that men of authority must be allowed to commit those crimes, purely due to their irreplaceability within the movement.
We cannot continue to put the immigrants, the minority voters, the Muslims and the "globalists" in their place if our leaders are expected to face consequences for breaking the law, the argument will be. And they will ask the most rabid in Trump's base, the people who drive around in white vans plastered with images of the man's face, to rally to that cause.
The Republican Party has had at this point hundreds of opportunities to untether themselves from cheap corruption and crookedness, and has not done a damn thing—on the contrary, Republican lawmakers have fallen over each other in their attempts to sabotage investigations of alleged criminal acts. If the party was interested in the slightest in detaching themselves from Donald Trump, prosecutorial documents bluntly stating the involvement of Trump, his campaign, and his company in a criminal conspiracy would be the place to do it.
There has been, as of yet, not even the slightest hint of that happening.