After Donald Trump incited a riot at the Capitol in 2021, Peter Meijer described him as “unfit for office.” And when Meijer cast one of just ten Republican votes to impeach the former president in the House of Representatives that year, he warned that more political violence could follow—thanks to the spinelessness of some in his own party. “Instead of telling the people of America and their supporters what they need to hear, we have had too many politicians telling them what they want to hear,” the then-Michigan congressman said at the time. “That type of reactive leadership is not going to make the Republican Party ever be a party that is trusted to govern in this country again, and we need to fix it.”

Two years and some change later, Meijer is doing a 180; in interviews since entering the race for an open Senate seat in Michigan, he’s spoken favorably of Trump, suggesting earlier this month that the former president is more honest than his successor. And, in an interview with Politico Monday, the ex-lawmaker acknowledged that he would vote for the man he once voted to impeach if the Republican front-runner becomes the GOP nominee, as he appears increasingly likely to do.

“My overarching goal is to make Joe Biden a one-term president,” Meijer told Politico’s Adam Wren. “I think that economic damage that he has wrought and will continue to bring will have far more wide-reaching negative consequences on the country than a second non-consecutive Trump administration.”

It’s a wild calculation, given the naked authoritarianism Trump would seek to usher in should he return to office. It speaks to the extremism at the heart of the contemporary GOP: Is this really what passes for reasonable in today’s Republican Party?

Of course, Meijer may have other considerations in mind beyond principles. For one, there’s the political dynamics of a GOP primary, in which there may not be as much appetite for his more moderate voting record, and allegiance to Trump remains the price of admission. For another, there’s spite: Meijer succumbed to a right-wing primary challenge last year that was boosted by the Democrats as part of a controversial strategy to draw easier opponents. It worked. Democrat Hillary Scholten defeated far-right Republican John Gibbs to flip the seat. Meijer was furious—and remains so. “Right now, I’m just very much in ‘a pox on all houses’ mentality,’” he told Politico, expressing “frustration at the cynical calculation that I’ve seen on the Democratic side.”

But in softening on Trump and drawing an equivalence between the former president and the current one, Meijer is proving the point of Democratic strategists, who, in 2022, argued that “no matter what Republican is nominated, they are going to get pushed to move to where their base is,” as Democratic consultant Jared Leopold put it to Vox at the time.

That appears to be playing out in Meijer's Senate bid, even as he tries to spin his capitulation as an expression of conviction. “I think a lot of the ways in which he kind of shook up the political establishment was a net positive,” Meijer said of Trump. “Like, he shook it too much. After the election, he kind of lost control of where the trends were going. But that does not mean in any way, shape, or form that I think we should be returning to the pre-Trump moment.”