They aren't thinking that way. What's been happening is the activist core of the GOP is collapsing in on itself like a black hole and the folks who are left are super homogeneous. So when they demonize gays or trans people or sell out to their energy bribers, er, donors there's nobody else in the room to say, "stop, we're not in favor of that."
The GOP reminds me of a student council that keeps voting to encode language about "microaggressions." Everybody in the room is exactly the same and has come off exactly the same conveyor belt, so that language is natural to them. The result is an unbreakable groupthink that to the rest of the world looks like a cult
The GOP always had crazies like this -- Birchers, white supremacists, homophobes so obsessed you really had to wonder... -- but they have become so narrow and united by paranoia and fury that their standard deviation is dropping towards zero.
