Trump's behavior is either (A) really not that bad, or (B) something the entire GOP is in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious denial about. Do they really believe that Trump's sideshow isn't really that's harmful, nothing but a tut-tutting point? Or do they really view him as harmful, but are "managing their addiction" because he's their Signer-In-Chief? If Trump were the threat to the Republic that the #NeverTrump crew say he is, why didn't the GOP bolt in larger numbers?
Obviously, the answer is that much of the GOP elite disagrees with GOP voters over how bad Trump is.
That said, maybe the disagreement isn't quite as big as it's made out to be. It's not like every single Republican in the country voted for Trump last November. If we go to the exit polls, it says that 33% of those who showed up at the polls last November identified themselves as Republicans. And among those voters, the vote went like this:
Trump 88%
Clinton 8%
3rd party 4%
So that's 12% of self-identified Republican voters going for someone other than Trump. But that may well be an "underestimate" in the sense that some of the voters who opted for Romney in 2012 but went Clinton or 3rd party in 2016 may have simply chosen not to identify as Republicans anymore in 2016. So there may have been some churn in partisan loyalties: Some Dems and Republicans swapping loyalties between the 2012 and 2016 elections, which caused some of the big swings among certain demographics, like the widening education gap between the parties that emerged in 2016. Maybe ~15% each way?
15% is also probably about the same as the percentage of Republicans in Congress who refused to endorse Trump last year. So in that sense, Republican elites were actually representative of the voters in their party. A small but non-negligible %age of them refused to support their party's nominee.
What was different this time is that there's always a small but non-negligible %age of a party's voters who won't support their party's presidential nominee, but usually among the party's elected officials there's near-unanimous support, and that didn't happen for Trump last year.
