Trump was acquitted Wednesday on a largely party-line vote not because the Senate believes he didn’t conspire to withhold aid to Ukraine in exchange for political favors, but because the Republicans have now explicitly decided they don’t care that he did this. Having decided to block the testimony of any witnesses who might make it too politically uncomfortable for such a cavalier attitude to stand in the court of public opinion, Mitch McConnell’s senators decided to speedily wrap up the trial and vote to acquit in the face of overwhelming evidence of Trump’s wrong-doings. As a result, the “so what?” defense has won, and Trump has shed one of the last restraints on his tyrannical presidency. The consequences will ricochet through the body politic for years, perhaps generations, to come.

As a result, Donald Trump will head into the election knowing that he can call on foreign governments, private businesses and even criminal enterprises to help his re-election bid; that he can promise and trade favors at will; and that his party will do excruciatingly little to stop him. He will head into this election with a television and internet propaganda machine reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels’s in Nazi Germany, and with a quiescent Republican Party that has reinvented itself as a party not of ideas but of fealty to an individual. He will head into this election knowing the Senate has signed off on the vastly destructive legal doctrine that a president can do no wrong. Taken to an extreme, consider what terrifying, violent, corrupt acts such a doctrine would allow the president to engage in or encourage.

There is nothing remotely democratic about this reinvention. It brings to mind the rationale that justified the totalitarian nightmare systems that characterized the mid-20th century and caused vast suffering around the globe. We have, over the past week, witnessed the GOP openly convert itself into a pseudo-fascistic praetorian guard for a Mussolini-wannabe president.