As the joke goes, if you elect a clown, you should expect to see a circus.

The big-top free-for-all in the U.S. House of Representatives demonstrates that a circus is exactly what the national Republican Party has become.

The GOP at the federal level is peopled with—and, in many ways, dominated by—cluelessly tragicomic performance artists who think striking poses is the same as striking blows. They not only have no intention of ever governing—because governing means taking responsibility and accepting accountability for one’s actions—but they’re also not really serious about winning.

If they were, they wouldn’t have timed their ouster of U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, to drown out any attention that might have been paid to Hunter Biden’s first day in court. Republican strategists have been working for months to make the president’s surviving son the poster boy, not just for Joe Biden’s administration, but for the Democratic Party as a whole. But, seeing a chance to steal the spotlight one more time for their antics, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, and his little band of deep thinkers made history by toppling a speaker of their own party for the first time in U.S. history.

And they let the younger Biden plead not guilty to three charges of possessing a firearm illegally in relative quiet.

Thanks to Gaetz’s prancing antics in the center ring, the GOP now is in complete disarray. After McCarthy was ousted, a microphone near the House floor caught a Republican member of the people’s chamber asking plaintively, “What happens now?”

Good question.

McCarthy captured the speaker’s post after years of maneuvering by selling his soul—and then a little bit more. He promised fealty to the most radical members of his caucus after being pushed through 15 humiliating votes to elect the House speaker—even though he was the only viable candidate.

His abasement of himself and his position bought him nothing but embarrassment and frustration, punctuated by the indignity of being the only leader of the House to be tossed overboard by his own party since America became a republic.

Now, no sane person would want the job, knowing that he or she was likely to be shown the same respect that a pinata at a child’s birthday party typically receives.

Sanity, though, is not a prerequisite for being a Republican member of the House, as Gaetz and crew have demonstrated. Someone will emerge from the snarling pack, unaware that the wolves inevitably will turn on him or her too as soon as the mood suits them.

That’s because Gaetz and company raise money not by accomplishing anything, but by providing good theater. Nestled in safely gerrymandered districts around the country, they can do the most outlandish things secure in the knowledge that they cannot alienate their constituents. That frees them up to pitch unchecked and untethered nonsense—much of it dangerous nonsense—to like-thinking marks and rubes all around the country.

This was predictable.

In the interim between Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his inauguration of January of 2017, I had lunch with a Republican elder and a longtime Solon of the conservative movement.

I told him I thought Trump would end up destroying the Republican Party.

He chuckled at my naivete about how the world and political power work.

Trump, he reassured me, would be a conventional GOP president, one who focused on providing tax cuts, deregulation and promotion of corporate interests. The wise men of the Party would bring him around and curb his excesses—sort of like wranglers gentling a horse—and turn him into a typical Republican.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, Trump turned on the party, driving out Republicans who voted with him 95 percent of the time because they weren’t sufficiently “loyal.” He chased away those—the Cheneys, the Bushes—with much longer Republican pedigrees than he possessed.

If Ronald Reagan had living descendants who aspired to leaders in the GOP, Trump doubtless would have turned the firehose on them too.

Worse, he dragged into the party hustlers, grifters and con artists such as Gaetz and his camp followers who realized that Trump had provided them with a whole new money tree to shake.

Traditional Republicans now are shocked at what their party has become.

They shouldn’t be.

Elect a clown and the circus will follow.

Every time.