The latest indictment of Donald Trump, an unprecedented fourth set of charges handed down against him in a span of four months, has spawned chatter across America’s airwaves and dinner tables about the GOP’s prospects in 2024. Will they be doomed not just by the dark shadow cast by the cases against Trump but also by what is sure to be his continuing obsession with perpetuating the lie that he won the 2020 presidential contest?

If Trump ends up being the GOP nominee, it’s likely that much of the party will, like lemmings, continue to hew to Trump’s irrational, self-serving script and echo his indefensible assertions.

Republicans even want Trump’s main competition right now, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, to treat the former president with kid gloves. The New York Times accessed a debate prep memo that a super political action committee worked up for DeSantis, in which the advice for the Sunshine State governor at Wednesday’s GOP presidential debate is to “defend Trump when Chris Christie attacks him.”

That kind of blind, self-destructive loyalty should have Republicans more than concerned about their party’s chances. But the GOP should be worried about something even more ominous.

As long as the GOP, particularly its top leaders, parrot Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election, the party will continue to forsake its integral role in a two-party democracy. Rather than standing for America’s founding ideals, the GOP will be working against them.

There’s nothing ambiguous about what Trump and his circle did on Jan. 6 and in the weeks preceding that horrible day. The renunciation of American rule of law, of the sanctity inherent in the peaceful transfer of power, was plainly evident in Trump’s words and actions aimed at selfishly — and illegally — clinging to power. It’s the kind of behavior that transcends politics and requires nonpartisan repudiation from all sides of the political landscape, most of all from Trump’s Republican brethren.

Sadly, save for such exceptions as GOP presidential candidates Christie and Will Hurd, the Republican Party has chosen to either mutely ignore Trump’s affronts to democracy and the indictments they produced or to self-servingly defend him out of fear of offending the former president’s still-powerful base.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s sweeping indictment lays out the former president’s bid to subvert the will of the voters, a desperate, unconscionable gambit that led to what amounted to an attempted coup on Jan. 6. Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ prosecution also centers on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, but through the prism of how it played out in Georgia and with a reliance on racketeering laws typically associated with cases against mafia chieftains and street gangs.

The application of racketeering statutes is appropriate. Indeed, Trump often has acted as if he were a mafia don. In Georgia, he is charged with a vast scheme that included everything from conspiracy to commit first-degree forgery and impersonating a public officer to filing false statements.

In a particularly telling passage, the Georgia indictment cites Trump’s conversation on Dec. 27, 2020, with acting U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue in which Trump allegedly told them, “Just say that the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

Imagine, if only for a moment, that Trump wins in 2024. He could shut down the federal prosecutions against him. He could also pardon himself if convicted in the federal cases, though he could not do so in the state prosecutions in New York and Georgia. The damage that his return to the Oval Office would inflict on America’s stature as a vanguard for democracy, both here and abroad, would be incalculable.

That’s why Republicans must think bigger than their own self-preservation. Republican Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s former lieutenant governor and a strong Trump opponent, summed it up well last week. The New York Times quoted him as saying, “We’re either as Republicans going to take our medicine and realize the election wasn’t rigged” or lose again.