Mitch McConnell is savvy enough to know that when he took the Senate floor to blame Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, he was pouring gasoline on an intraparty feud.

As accurate as McConnell’s statement may have been — “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — McConnell was attacking a man who had won an unprecedented level of devotion from a majority of the Republican electorate, devotion bordering on religious zeal.

The escalating feud threatens to engulf the party in an internal struggle that will be fought out in the 2022 House and Senate primaries, pitting Trump-backed candidates against those who have offended the former president.

When Trump viciously counterattacked on Feb. 16, Democrats were especially cheered by this passage in his remarks:

Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership.

In effect, Trump is gearing up to run a slate of favored candidates in the 2022 primaries against incumbent Republicans, especially, but by no means limited to those who supported his impeachment.

Politico reported on Feb. 20 that:

Trump will soon begin vetting candidates at Mar-a-Lago who are eager to fulfill his promise to exact vengeance upon incumbent Republicans who’ve scorned him, and to ensure every open GOP seat in the 2022 midterms has a MAGA-approved contender vying for it.

Twenty Republican-held Senate seats are at stake in 2022, and at least two of the incumbents up for re-election — John Thune of South Dakota and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — are certain to be on Trump’s hit list.

Murkowski voted to convict the president. Thune voted against conviction, but before that he publicly dismissed efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump then tweeted on Dec. 13:

RINO John Thune, ‘Mitch’s boy’, should just let it play out. South Dakota doesn’t like weakness. He will be primaried in 2022, political career over!!!

McConnell will not be on Trump’s hit list for the simple reason that he just won re-election and does not have to face voters until 2026. But his name will be there in invisible ink.

Another group Trump is very likely to target for political extinction is made up of the 10 Republican members of the House who voted to impeach the president.

These incumbent Republicans only scratch the surface of the potential for intraparty conflict in the event Trump adopts a scorched earth strategy in an all-out attack on Republican candidates who voiced criticism of the former president.

Trump’s venom is likely to encompass a host of state-level Republicans who disputed his claims of a stolen election, including Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, both up for re-election in ’22.

Assuming that Trump versus McConnell becomes a major theme in the 2022 Republican primaries, the numbers, especially among white evangelical Christians, favor Trump.

Robert Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, noted that his group’s polling has found that many Republicans have elevated Trump to near-deity status. In an email, Jones wrote:

Just ahead of the election, a majority (55 percent) of white evangelicals and a plurality (47 percent) of Republicans said they saw Trump as “being called by God to lead at this critical time in our country.”

Jones continued:

If McConnell is counting on the impeachment for inciting insurrection to weaken Trump’s future within the party, he seems to have miscalculated: Three-quarters of Republicans and two-thirds of white evangelicals agreed with the statement, “Trump is a true patriot.”

I asked Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, about the consequences of a Trump versus McConnell battle over the future of the Republican Party. He emailed in reply: “The deck is stacked against McConnell, at least for the next election cycle.”

Jacobson sent a copy of a paper he is working on, “Donald Trump’s Big Lie and the Future of the Republican Party,” that provides strong evidence in support of his assessment.

Among Republicans, over much of the Trump presidency, the favorability ratings of Trump, the party and McConnell generally rose and fell in tandem, Jacobson noted. That changed in December 2020:

After the Electoral College voted in mid-December, the proportion holding favorable opinions of all three fell, but more for the Republican Party and much more for McConnell than for Trump. Trump’s average was 5.6 points lower for January-February 2021 than it had been for all of 2020, the party’s average was 11.3 points lower.

According to Jacobson, the drop was disastrous for McConnell:

In December, after McConnell congratulated Biden, his favorability ratings among Republicans dropped about 13 points from its postelection average (66 percent) and then fell another 17 points after he blamed Trump for the Capitol invasion, with the biggest drop occurring among the share of Republicans who held very favorable opinions of Trump (57 percent in this survey).

The pattern is clear in the accompanying graphic:

Breaking with Trump, Jacobson continued,

was clearly a greater sin in the eyes of most ordinary Republicans than anything Trump had done to subvert democracy or incite the Capitol mob.

The drop in Republican support for McConnell was

a telling sign of Trump’s continuing ascendancy among Republican identifiers and a clear warning to any Republican leader who might want to marginalize the ex-president.

Lerone Martin, a professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis, has a different but complementary take on the McConnell-Trump confrontation. McConnell, Martin argues, has boxed himself in:

McConnell finds himself in the position of Dr. Victor Frankenstein: the very entity that McConnell has helped to create, piece and hold together during the Trump presidency — so-called “governing” Republicans one the one hand, and the QAnon/white Christian nationalists conspiracy theorists on the other — may prove to lead to his political destruction and downfall.

Trump, in contrast, Martin continued, “is now the powerful symbol, perhaps bellwether of the culture wars.” McConnell may try to keep Trumpism at arms lengths, but, Martin added, “in order to win a national election, McConnell knows Republicans need the Trumpian culture war voter.”

Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at Boston University, responded to my inquiry noting that she is not an expert “on the ins and outs of the party itself.”

But, she continued,

what I do know is that the evangelicals who have pledged their loyalty to Trump and are deeply infused with a white Christian nationalist agenda will likely turn on McConnell. For them, Trump is the Republican Party (or any other party he might choose to set up).

Not everyone I consulted agreed that in a Trump-McConnell battle, McConnell was the likely loser.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern, wrote in an email:

My sense is that the bluster between Trump and McConnell will die down as we get closer to the midterms. But until then I’m not sure there is a single Republican coalition but rather a fractured and fragmented set of affiliates, some of whom (like Collins and Murkowski) are orbiting further and further away from the center as defined by Trump.

In fact, Hurd argued, the center

is now up for grabs and McConnell is wisely making a play for it. It’s a smart strategy given what happened to the party electorally speaking since Trump took office. Jan. 6 sealed the intuition among key G.O.P. leaders that Trump’s star will continue to fade.

Robert Boatright, a political scientist at Clark University who has studied primary elections, questioned how effective Trump would be in recruiting primary challengers, but, he added by email, “the fact that he has called for challenges to incumbents he dislikes will encourage more people to run.”

Already, Boatright noted, there are

announced challengers to some of the Republicans who voted for impeachment, but these people aren’t running because Trump encouraged them to run — they made the decision on their own, and they very well could win without any help from Trump.

In which case Trump would be sure to take credit.

Trump’s effectiveness will also be constrained by the fact that he “won’t be able to use Twitter, which has been the forum through which he has often offered endorsements in the past,” Boatright said.

The February 19-22 Economist/YouGov poll cited above found that 48 percent of Republicans said they would not vote for a candidate critical of Trump, more than double the 23 percent who said they would. 29 percent were not sure.

Similarly, 61 percent of Republicans said a Trump endorsement would make them more likely to vote for a candidate; only 5 percent said it would make it less likely.

Since the violence of Jan. 6, there have been widespread reports of many Republicans giving up their party to become registered independents or Democrats.

On Feb. 10, for example my Times colleagues, Nick Corasaniti, Annie Karni and Isabella Grullón Paz, reported that in 25 states with readily available data, “nearly 140,000 Republicans had quit the party,” including more than 12,000 in Pennsylvania, 10,000-plus in Arizona and more than 33,000 in California.

These defections suggest a weakening of Republican strength in upcoming general elections, but in terms of internal party conflict, the defections only strengthen Trump’s hand: As anti-Trump voters leave the party, the pro-Trump wing gains more power.

This power, in turn, can be seen in the decision of state and local county parties to censure and denounce Republican members of the House and Senate who voted in favor of impeachment or conviction.

On Feb. 6, the Wyoming Republican Party voted not only to censure Representative Liz Cheney, but also called on her “to immediately resign from her position,” and declared that the party would “withhold any future political funding.” It should be noted, however, that even as her support in Wyoming eroded, her Republican colleagues in the House, guided by the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, rejected a move to take away Cheney’s leadership post.

One of the more revealing recent polls of Republican voters tested favorable/unfavorable views of Cheney, the chair of the House Republican Conference, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon supporter when elected to the House last year from Georgia. Greene has won a peculiar kind of fame with her pre-election declarations that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was guilty of treason.

Greene suggested Pelosi could be executed, CNN reported. “She’s a traitor to our country,” Greene declared in a video posted on Facebook.

She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.

A February 6-9 Economist/YouGov poll asked voters for their ratings of Cheney and Greene. Among Republicans, Cheney was viewed unfavorably, 52 percent to 20 percent. Greene, in contrast, was viewed favorably 40 percent to 24 percent.

There are a variety of angles from which to view the McConnell-Trump feud.

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review writing at Politico, argues that the

fight isn’t exactly over the soul of the Republican Party, but it is over whether there will be significant space in the party for figures other than Trump to have notable influence over its direction.

Lowry acknowledges

at the outset, this contest isn’t a fair fight. McConnell, a.k.a. “Cocaine Mitch,” has acquired considerable new street cred on the right over the years with his hard-nosed work on judges. Nonetheless, there are very few rank-and-file Republicans interested in storming any hills for Mitch McConnell, while many of them would scale K2 for Donald Trump.

McConnell’s task, according to Lowry, is not to beat Trump in a head-to-head fight, but “to work to block electorally poisonous, or at least risky, Trumpists from winning Senate primaries, say, in the most extreme example, Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia.”

In this kind of fight, McConnell brings his experience opposing divisive nominations during the Tea Party era a decade ago, and “an ability to focus on long-term goals that the easily distracted Trump, driven by personal animosities, does not” — not to mention McConnell’s fund-raising prowess.

There is no doubt, Lowry concluded, that

Trump is a potent political figure. Yet, his draw isn’t transferable to other Republicans when he’s not on the ballot, and he failed to get above 47 percent of the vote in two national elections against lackluster opponents.

In fact, the evidence suggests that his draw is transferable.

In 2018 when Trump was not on the ballot, 538 calculated that 15 out of a total of 17 candidates he endorsed won open-seat primary contests that often pit two conservatives against each other. Trump’s win-loss ratio was better than 11 conservative and business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth and the Koch network.

There is a recent precedent for the current Trump-McConnell conflict that I just mentioned, the Tea Party versus the Republican establishment in the elections of 2010 and 2012.

The results were a mixed bag. One group of Tea Party candidates won primaries but lost the general election in states as diverse as Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, Alaska and Indiana. Another group, including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Tim Scott and Mike Lee, defeated establishment candidates in the primaries and went on to win Senate seats in the general election. The movement also produced some of the more outspoken conservatives in the House, some of whom have since proven to be Trump’s most devoted allies, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.

The Trump wing of the Republican Party is not only dominant, it is angrier and more determined to disrupt the normal course of events than the Tea Party movement was 10 years ago. And Trump commands a level of loyalty the envy of authoritarians around the world.

What remains unknown is the strength of Trump’s determination and his ability to consistently stay at the helm of an internal partisan power struggle at a time when he will not only face opposition from the party establishment, but an onslaught of debilitating civil and criminal charges.

On Monday, the Supreme Court denied Trump’s final bid to block the release of his tax returns and financial records to Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney.

The material is key to at least two lines of inquiry Vance is pursuing: whether the former president and his company manipulated property values to get favorable bank loans and tax benefits, and whether Trump was involved in payments to two women, as A.P. put it, “to keep them quiet during the 2016 presidential campaign about alleged extramarital affairs with Trump.”

Those cases just scratch the surface of the litigation Trump potentially faces. Some of the other legal cases Trump could be looking at include a criminal investigation into his attempt to persuade Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to alter the 2020 election results, and charges that Trump incited his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to “disrupt the certification of his election loss.”

Undeterred, Trump plans to lay waste to his critics on Sunday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando,

Trump’s strength lies in both the man — the cult of personality he has constructed and maintained — and in the agenda he represents: a return to the America that used to be, at least in the popular imagination, before the women’s and civil rights and gay rights revolutions, before diversity, sexual harassment and political correctness had been invented.

Trump’s test in 2022 and especially 2024 will lie in whether he can succeed in what is likely to be a futile struggle to return to that fictional past. McConnell is playing his own long game; the question for him is whether he can outlast and outmaneuver Trump. I would say Trump is facing many obstacles, of which Mitch McConnell is only one. History is another.

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