In a recent interview promoting the biography of James Baker he recently co-authored with his wife Susan Glasser, New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker (no relation) says the former secretary of state “is like a parable for the modern Republican Party.”

In the book, The Man Who Ran Washington: the Life and Times of James Baker III, it’s reported that Baker, a Bush family confidant, has a low opinion of President Trump but due to tax cuts, deregulation and conservative appointments to the federal bench, would like to see him reelected.

This distinguishes him from the Bushes and many veterans of both presidents’ administrations. As Peter Baker notes, George H.W. Bush voted for Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush wrote-in her son Jeb, and George W. Bush says he voted for “none of the above.”

In recent days, Marc Racicot, a former head of the RNC and the campaign chairman for George W. Bush in 2004, endorsed Joe Biden, as did Bush’s first director of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge.

They joined a group of 73 Republican national security officials who came out for Biden in August. But if there’s no shortage of prominent Republicans who have split from Trump, it’s voters who think like Baker who give him power and a chance of reelection.

Baker’s case is especially glaring because Trump has torn down much of the edifice he built in his career as a foreign policy leader. In particular, the president’s contempt for international alliances, American leadership, and free trade stand as a sharp rebuke of Baker’s approach to managing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of a post-Cold War world. Baker’s co-architect of that world, now deceased former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, endorsed Clinton in 2016. Colin Powell broke with the GOP in 2008 and endorsed Barack Obama. Yet, Baker remains loyal to the party and to Trump despite this assault on his legacy.

The president frequently exaggerates the percentage of support he retains from Republican voters, but it stands at 94 percent in the most recent Gallup poll. That’s partly because some defectors, like Powell, no longer self-identify or register as Republicans, but it still shows that many Americans will adjust to almost anything in the service of interests they hold dear.

When that interest is principled and genuine, as the abortion issue is to many voters, it’s more defensible than when it’s a self-interested desire to pay fewer taxes and face less regulation. Baker doesn’t have that excuse. His known contempt for social conservatives goes back to earliest days of the Reagan administration, when he advised the president to nominate Sandra Day O’Conner to the Supreme Court over the objections of the pro-life movement.

Yet, social conservatives aren’t exempt from the criticism that their principles are malleable. Trump’s judicial appointments may advance their goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, but he makes a mockery of family values.

The presidency is Donald Trump forces Republicans to make difficult decisions about which of their principles are most important, and the results reveal a lot about character.

In Baker’s case, his biographer put it this way:

I think that Baker, in some ways, is like a parable for the modern Republican Party. His struggle has been the larger party struggle with Trump, who is not their cup of tea. You know, they don’t particularly like him, they wouldn’t invite him to their country clubs, and they wouldn’t invite him to their homes for Thanksgiving dinner. But, you know, he has been successful at what Jared Kushner told me a couple weeks ago was the hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And they have found they’ve decided that they have to accommodate themselves to him for at least as long as he’s in office.

Trump’s campaign is not going well but Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight still gives him a 21 percentchance of winning the election (and a 54 percent of winning if Biden carries the popular vote by fewer than 3 points). Thanks to Republicans like Baker who “accommodate themselves,” it’s possible that Trump will be in office a lot longer.