If Trump gets impeached the Republicans will lose voters
If Trump doesn’t get impeached then big donors will continue to stop funding their corruption
He's been impeached. You mean convicted. And if convicted, then hopefully there will be a vote to bar him from seeking public office.
My feeling is McConnell believes
the money is on the side of conviction, and on the corollary motion to keep Trump out of the public arena for 2024.
And that furthermore, McConnell figures the sane side of the Republican party will do better to rid itself now of the overt racists and xenophobes and plain nutjobs that Trump scarfed up. In the end they and Trump have more drawbacks than they do marginal utility to the GOP going forward.
People around the world will not forget about what happened in the USA on January 6, 2021. The GOP must be seen to expel those in its party who encouraged that insurrection by their own lies or blinking at lies by others.
Mitch is betting the fracture will leave the establishment Republicans with more clout than the splittists will manage to accrue out there in voterland. Ironically if Biden can get covid under control and jack up the economy, he'll have given a leg up to the regular GOP on that score.
In other words Mitch probably hopes not to "go back" but to resume going forward from where they were in 2013 after Romney's loss, trying to scarf up new blocs of voters who could be expected to be drawn by a platform of free trade, low taxes, deregulation of industry and conservative social views. The effort would also include trying to win back independent voters who were put off by Trump's attitude towards women, people of color, even legal immigrants, people with centrist view and a raft of voters who felt they themselves or their kin were being singled out negatively, even as Trump just impulsively lambasted whole groups of people: Mexicans, Muslims, folks from "shithole countries". Trump, wow, just such a moron. Did he not realize that a lot of conservative voters in the USA happen not to be white Christians?!