Once again at the approach of an election, it is time for the Republicans to try to heal their differences, if only opportunistically. It was obvious and notorious during the term of President Trump that his opponents within the Republican Party, the Never-Trumpers, resented the president as a dangerous interloper and a culturally and behaviorally offensive personality. 

A few, like the former speaker and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, gracefully withdrew. Most, though, regarded Mr. Trump as a transitory phenomenon whose program they could generally support and even take some credit for but whom they hoped would soon depart. 

None was more prominent in this category than the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. He had said in the early campaign season of 2016 that if Mr. Trump were nominated, the congressional campaign would “drop him like a hot rock” and confine its support to congressional candidates.

Messrs. McConnell and Ryan badly let the president down on the repeal of Obamacare: having voted many times for its repeal under the previous administration when they knew they would be vetoed by President Obama, they led the same battle under President Trump very half-heartedly, assuring the defeat of repeal and their own exposure as rank hypocrites. 

Yet Messrs. McConnell and Trump collaborated well on the elevation of Supreme Court justices and Mr. McConnell delivered faithfully in defeating the preposterous first impeachment of the president. Mr. McConnell was distinctly consolable over the questionable 2020 election result and was indistinguishable in his views from the Democrats in his imputation to Mr. Trump of substantial responsibility for the trespass, vandalism, and violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

Mr. McConnell gave Mr. Trump no assistance at all in his reelection campaign, and failed to object to the outrageous and in a number of cases undoubtedly unconstitutional revisions of voting and voting counting rules in swing states that provided millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots, raising concerns about ballot harvesting. These measures could have been decisive in a close election that would have been turned with only 50,000 votes in three states. 

Mr. McConnell still considered it Mr. Trump’s duty to campaign hard for the Senate special elections in Georgia in order to preserve his own sinecure as majority leader. Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who served as Trump’s transportation secretary, abruptly resigned; It was all a shabby return on Mr. Trump’s genuine effort to bury the hatchet.

Though Mr. Trump’s motives in his somewhat desultory intervention in those campaigns have not been entirely clear, he has said that if the Democratic candidates had not been elected in Georgia the country would never have seen how incompetent and extreme the Biden administration is. 

It would, indeed, have been difficult to predict the multitudinous debacles that have occurred: the open border, the green terror, the skyrocketing crime, the mindless inflationary spending, the Afghanistan disaster, and the continued lawless authoritarianism of the Justice Department and the FBI.

This egregiously failed administration has conferred an unusual level of solidarity on the Republicans and this is what President Biden and his strategists have attacked with the asinine and almost totalitarian invasion and occupation of the former president’s home while the incumbent president rails against what he considers to be the semi-fascist nature of the MAGA movement, which is in fact traditional American patriotism that could have been advocated by FDR and Harry Truman and supported by JFK, LBJ, and the Clintons.                                       

Mr. McConnell made no secret of the fact that he assumed that national politics had seen the last of Mr. Trump, a fact to which he was more than amenable.

For those in sympathy with Mr. Trump’s position that the cooperation of bipartisanship of both parties had led to chronic misgovernment in the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations, there can have been few more repulsive spectacles than the post-inaugural orgy of gentle backslapping and log-rolling as Mr. McConnell celebrated the election to national office of his two highly companionable former Senate mates, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 

The division within the Republican Party between Mr. Trump and his opponents remains a one-sided one. All polls show Mr. Trump leading among Republican candidates for the 2024 presidential nomination by 30 or more points, and the polling since the Keystone Kops operation at Mar-a-Lago has clearly strengthened Mr. Trump’s position in the Republican Party. 

The Democrats cannot, after the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense and the spurious impeachments, while whitewashing Secretary Clinton’s destruction of subpoenaed evidence and sitting like dumplings on the geysers of evidence of Biden family corruption, easily justify using reservations over partial non-compliance with the noncriminal Presidential Records Act 19 months after Mr. Trump left office, to claim possible criminality as they spent nine hours rummaging through papers that Mr. Trump had not packed himself when he left the White House and which the FBI had been frolicking in for many weeks already, as well as in such potential treasure troves of misplaced national security material as Melania’s lingerie and underwear drawers.                                 

Mr. McConnell’s own initial response to this sanctimonious rodomontade was eloquently noncommittal as he obviously fervently hoped that it might amount to something. After a couple of days that unworthy hope failed and he took higher ground and asked for more information.

Now that it is fairly clear that the raid in Palm Beach was just another Democratic political perversion of the justice system, and the former president has enhanced his control of the Republican Party, it is time for the Never Trumpers who are more dependent on his success than ever for their own, to hold their noses and get on board the Trump bandwagon. 

Over 90 percent of those whom he endorsed have been nominated and despite the last ditch effort of the Trump-haters to pretend that his protégés may fail to win the Senate, with any coherent effort the Republicans will sweep the Congress in November.

In their partisan as well as in the national interest they should bury the hatchet elsewhere than in each other’s backs. The crushing defeat of chief party traitor Liz Cheney in the former Cheney fiefdom of Wyoming two weeks ago signaled that it was time for the regular Republicans to make a greater attempt at cohabitation with the Trump fact.

The key to this is the collective stated opinion that there were serious irregularities in the 2020 presidential election and that the prolonged Stalinesque effort to suppress recognition of that fact has failed; as in 1960 and 2000, while we know who won the election, it is not clear who really won. There will be many challenges and disappointments, but the United States is strong enough to navigate the last two years of the Biden catastrophe and then clean house thoroughly in the Augean Stable of the federal government.