Go back and look where they were the day before Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 and tell me that lot qualified as "sane." Trump was an outlier, but only slightly and only in style. In terms of substance, there's very little that separates him from even a John Kasich. The GQP is still, as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it back in 2012:
"an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct."
And bear in mind, they wrote that article in April of 2012, when hardly anyone noticed the one-issue clown car of a campaign the Orange Douchebag briefly ran. The insanity of the GQP pre-dates Trump and Trumpism. These are not your pre-Nixon's-2nd-term republicans. Now, if you want to say that the R's who did well in the midterms are "more sane" than the Trumpists, that's fine. Just understand that's like arguing who the nicest guy in prison is. It's like...it's like...Ted Bundy meeting with Jeff Dahmer and Bundy says "wait, you rape them and eat them after they're dead? YOU'RE SICK!!!"