THE DESERVEDLY HIGH COST OF RACIST PANDERING:

In slavishly supporting Trump and his Maga - Make America Great Again - supporters, they have empowered a political movement that is increasingly testing the limits of the US democratic experiment.

McCarthy's political trajectory tells the sorry tale. After January 6, McCarthy, who, along with his political colleagues, was forced to hide from the marauding insurrectionists, turned against the man responsible for the day's violence. Privately, he told fellow Republicans: "I've had it with this guy". But within weeks, he travelled to the ex-president's palatial digs in South Florida and, on bended knee, pledged loyalty to the GOP's orange god. He tried to block a bipartisan congressional committee to investigate January 6 and allied himself with conspiracy theorists who continued to spread lies about the 2020 election. Earlier this year, he gave in to Republican extremists and announced an impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, even though there is no evidence that the president has committed any impeachable offences.

McCarthy, like countless Republican supplicants over the past eight years, realised that his political aspirations were directly tied to his willingness to support Trump and the extremist forces within the party that have rallied around him. In a tale as old as time, he made a deal with the devil, only to be burned by the political forces he'd empowered. Trump's hold over the Republican party is so complete that it borders on the pathological. Since March, he has been indicted four times and charged with 91 separate felonies. Yet his poll numbers among Republicans have dramatically improved. He enjoys a more than 45-point lead in the race for the party's presidential nomination.

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