Dune is the story of how the indigenous people find their savior—he is called Muad'Dib—who leads them to overthrow the empire and take control of their home planet. How does he do it? By threatening to destroy the spice.
Muad'Dib explains his insight this way:
The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.
This simple maxim is root of all power. And it explains why Donald Trump controls the Republican party, absolutely. ...
And here is the fundamental truth that Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, and the rest intuitively grasped: (1) They cared—still do care—a great deal about the Republican party. (2) Trump does not care about the party at all. If the Republican party were broken, institutional Republicans would be at sea. Mitt Romney’s reporting makes that clear.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, would simply move on to the next grift.
The Republican party is Trump’s hostage because he is willing to kill it and traditional Republicans are not.
About that Romney piece. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that for most people adulthood is just a continuation of high school. The Coppins' piece shows that, at least as far as the Senate Republicans go, it’s a continuation of middle school. These GOP senators have the emotional and moral maturity of 5th graders.
Romney stands out because he's the 8th grader. He is like the bright, boy-scouty counselor at Christian summer camp trying to keep the 5th graders in line. But there's this very cool, rule-breaking 6th grader who is always making fun of the stiffly upright 8th grader because he's so profoundly un-cool. The 5th graders at first find the 6th grader uncomfortably naughty, but look, he's getting away with it. Wow. They'll do whatever he wants.
I appreciate Romney for whatever it is in him that resists the juvenile nihilism of his colleagues. He is in comparison a decent man. To what degree it is his potty training and to what degree it is genuine conscience I don't know. It's some measure of both, but the level of his naivete and simplistic thinking is gobsmacking.