PRE-CULT:

Who would be more perfect for the moment than a man who had taken over a state amid a gubernatorial pardon-selling scandal so serious that he was sworn in three days early in a secret 1979 ceremony, to cut short outgoing Gov. Ray Blanton's corruption spree? So sensational they made a movie about it, called "Marie," in which a lawyer (and future senator) named Fred Thompson played himself? The obvious narrative was that Alexander knew how to restore trust in government -- he had already done it in Tennessee.

Alexander never became president, but in 2002, he was elected to his first of three terms in the Senate. He was known in Washington for pragmatic bipartisanship -- a senator who quit leadership in 2011 so he could work across the aisle more often, and who made good on that most recently in partnership with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on education and health policy.

Now Alexander's just another Republican cowering at the prospect of crossing President Donald Trump, one of the many people I don't recognize despite having covered and followed them for years or even decades.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is another. We first met on Sen. John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, when Graham and Thompson were all in with the McCain brand of "straight talk," rebellious independence and cross-party relationships.

There's also Florida's Marco Rubio, who was instrumental (with Graham) in getting a landmark bipartisan immigration bill through the Senate in 2013. Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, whose primary loss to a Tea Party candidate in 2010, and subsequent win as a write-in candidate, should have meant she'd never owe her party anything, and who played key roles in bipartisan negotiations I wrote about in "The Art of the Political Deal." There's even Susan Collins, who with her moderate Maine colleague Olympia Snowe was so notorious in conservative circles for occasionally going her own way, she evinced disgust from an Arizonan fed up with both McCain and "those two women who vote with the Democrats all the time."

Feeling like a jilted lover:Trump impeachment inspired the Senate I loved to commit institutional suicide

These politicians are now strangers to me. Their whole party is untethered -- not just from reality and its own history, but also from the Constitution itself.

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