As the world watched Ukraine begin to hold back Vladimir Putin’s onslaught over the past week, the Russian president’s prospects appeared to dim on another front. An American Republican Party that had been so firmly in the thrall of Donald Trump – whose admiration for Putin seemingly knows no bounds – is showing more willingness to accept that the former US leader, who saw himself as emperor, is wearing no clothes. Representative Mo Brooks is seeking the Republican nomination for the US Senate in Alabama and has struggled against his primary opponents. Brooks had the temerity to suggest his party move past the groundless allegation that US President Joe Biden won the 2020 election fraudulently. Trump quickly rescinded his endorsement of Brooks, who had supported the former president’s lies about the election on January 6, 2021, and in the weeks leading up to it. Wearing body armour and exhorting Trump’s supporters to fight against the certification of Biden’s win, Brooks said on that day: “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” Brooks’ move delivered more ammunition to the House of Representatives select committee investigating the January 6 attack. It seems to suggest further momentum for those within the party and all other sane policymakers to end Trump’s status as the Republican leader. The repudiation of Trump’s brand within the party is occurring on other fronts. In a Senate commerce committee hearing last week about legislation designed to boost America’s tech competitiveness, the only committee member to suggest Washington join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) was Roger Wicker, a Republican from the deep red state of Mississippi. After Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger attested that alignment with CPTPP partners would be a positive policy move, Wicker asked Gelsinger if he could supplement his answer for the committee. Wicker’s determination to bring such a sore subject into a debate about legislation designed to boost America’s competitiveness against China, and elicit what he probably knew would be a ringing endorsement of such a move, is the latest indication that some Republicans might be considering a return to the party’s traditional ideological moorings . The initial iteration of the CPTPP was a foreign policy priority for the Democrats during the Barack Obama administration. This part of Obama’s “pivot to Asia” strategy never amounted to much in terms of shoring up Washington’s relations with China’s neighbours while Beijing made significant progress building its influence in the region. Obama’s effort was obliterated by Trump’s “ America first ” approach, a scorching repudiation of any multilateral trade agreements, not to mention multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and, most famously during the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization. Trump formally pulling US out of WHO over ‘China puppet’ claims It took the revelation of Putin’s monstrous ambitions in Ukraine to bring more of the combatants in America’s ideological civil war to understand that the aisle dividing them in the Capitol building should not become another Mason-Dixon Line. Trump-aligned Republicans probably never expected that we would see images such as the destruction of a Ukrainian theatre where children were sheltering or the obliteration of a maternity hospital . Another hint of a possible return to political integrity came when Republicans joined Democrats in applauding Biden’s accusation during his State of the Union address earlier this month that Putin was “a menacing dictator”. Does this mean Republicans have rejected Trump’s assessment that Putin is a “genius” ? That shift is far from assured. Many Republicans are hammering Biden for higher petrol prices even though Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is at least partly responsible. They have leaned even further into a culture war over race and sexuality that the Russian leader would fully support. Murder, ‘gay hunters’ strike terror in Russia’s LGBT community Meanwhile, some on the American far right – including commentators such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News and Candace Owens – have recently claimed that “Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989”. Their real grievance is one they share with Putin: the expansion of Nato and, by extension, the rules-based liberal order forged in the West. Over the decades, this has honed a new social order which affirms social equity, social inclusion and the need to act urgently to deal with our climate crisis, even if those goals have not yet been fully realised. Putin, Carlson and Owens might be on their back feet at the moment, but there is a long way to go before the winning side emerges. Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief