Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has a pet name for the four years in which Donald Trump occupied the Oval Office and savaged the country: “The previous administration.”

Rather than uttering Trump’s name when talking to reporters, McConnell prefers to deny voters the opportunity to recall the madman to whom he and other congressional Republicans gifted control of their entire party.

The vast majority of House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, have surrendered to the reality that Trump now owns their party. But at least some Senate Republicans are still working furiously to try to insulate their caucus from Trump’s clutches.

Last week Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the Senate GOP campaign chief, tried to lay out some guidelines for Republicans’ 2022 strategy: “What the conversation’s going to be about is the Biden agenda and what we’re going to do going forward.”

Then Trump went to CPAC in Dallas, Texas, over the weekend and—after paying lip service to immigrant “caravans” and critical race theory—reprised a greatest hits of his 2020 grievances.

“The entire system was rigged against the American people and rigged against a fair, decent and honest election,” he said, facing a red sea of waving MAGA hats. The entire weekend was a fun-filled Big Lie fest complete with a supposed “7-PT. PLAN TO RESTORE DONALD J. TRUMP IN DAYS, NOT YEARS,” which was distributed to attendees.

Many Republican leaders continue to urge their party members to focus on policy instead of Trump’s favorite topic: relitigating the results of the 2020 election. Some Senate Republicans are apparently aghast at what they have wrought.

“I think looking backward is a mistake. If Republicans are relitigating the last election, it means they’re not focusing on the next one,” Senate Republican Whip John Thune of South Dakota told reporters Monday, according to The Hill. The Senate GOP only has to net one seat in order to flip the chamber.

“Most voters in the country are going to want to know what you’re doing to solve economic challenges, what you’re going to do to deal with safety in our streets and stronger borders,” Thune added. “I would hope that state parties all across the country, at least on our side, stay focused on those.”

Good luck with that. Many state GOPs, particularly in swing states, are either avid amplifiers of Trump’s baseless claim about the election being stolen or they’re riven by it. Exhibit A: Arizona, where state Senate Republicans ordered the sham audit of Maricopa County ballots while the county’s GOP-dominated Board of Supervisors decry the audit as an embarrassing “spectacle that is harming all of us.”

In the meantime, GOP candidates for U.S. Senate hoping to win their primary are neck deep in Trump’s Big Lie, which is already defining Republicans in seven of the eight top-tier 2022 races that will decide the fate of which party controls the upper chamber.   

But Trump is also savaging Senate Republicans running in safe GOP seats who didn’t prove sufficiently loyal to him (i.e. they declined to vote to overturn the 2020 election). Here’s a brief overview:

In Alaska, both Trump and the Alaska Republican State Central Committee have endorsed the GOP challenger of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Kelly Tshibaka.
In Alabama, Trump continues to champion Rep. Mo Brooks for Senate while the state's retiring GOP Sen. Richard Shelby promotes his former chief of staff Katie Britt for the job. Trump recently issued a statement skewering Shelby as "the RINO Senator from Alabama."
In Oklahoma, Sen. James Lankford has a new primary challenger, Jackson Lahmeyer, a 29-year-old pastor from Tulsa who wants to see Trump reinstated and is promoting the notion that these Arizona-style sham audits could change the outcome of the 2020 election. State Republican Party chair John Bennett has endorsed Lahmeyer over Lankford.

The long and the short of it is, whether Senate Republicans retake control of the chamber or not in 2022, their caucus is going to end up being a good bit more MAGA-crazed than it was.

But as for their chances of netting the seat they need to flip the Senate, Sen. Thune laid out Republicans’ biggest challenge.

“You’ve got a third of the voters who think that the last election ought to be relitigated, you got a third on [the Democratic] side who want to turn us into Europe, but there’s a big third in the middle who are going to decide this election,” he said.

Thune’s comments about Europe notwithstanding, he’s at least right that some sliver of voters in the middle will likely decide which party controls the upper chamber. And those swing state voters aren’t going to be persuaded to vote Republican by loser, twice-impeached Trump’s incessant grousing over 2020. The question is whether sweeping Trump under the rug as “the former administration” is going to prove any more compelling to them.