Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.

The most basic problem for the Republican Party isn’t that Donald Trump is so strong, but that his competitors are so weak. One can find no better illustration of this, perhaps, than the sorry spectacle of Jeb Bush—who only a year ago was seen as heir apparent to the nomination—desperately trying to salvage his terminal candidacy by bringing in the one person who did more than anyone to destroy the modern GOP: his brother, George W. Bush. It was Bush, of course, whose reckless Iraq War and spending and financial policies led the party (and nation) to near-disaster, as Trump himself has been saying in South Carolina since last Saturday’s debate (once again defying the conventional party wisdom, this time when it comes to not criticizing the last Republican president). It was Bush’s rapid abandonment of a bromidic “compassionate conservatism” and foreign-policy restraint that exposed the GOP as a fatally divided party devoid of ideas.

Thus, in debunking the GOP’s hollow men and bringing the Bush-Cheney era to a close, Trump is essentially kicking in a rotten door. Today it would take the political equivalent of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory that just detected the waves predicted by Einstein to discern any fresh ideas in the black hole that constitutes the GOP. Into that void Trump has strode with all the hubris of one who recognizes weakness when he sees it—and is only too happy to call it out. His mockery of everything from GOP financiers—“nothing conservative about the Club for Growth coming into my office and demanding a $1M contribution, which naturally, they did not get”—to his palpable contempt for figures such as Bush indicates that his aim isn’t simply to win the nomination, but to redefine the party in his own image.


That won’t be hard, because it is an empty vessel. What is Trump filling it with? The irony of the new darling of the party’s disenchanted base is that his open divergence from the putative ideology of that base is near-complete. Trump preaches Trumpism; he doesn’t seem to care at all what the official party doctrine is supposed to be. Trump is not only not a neocon; he’s something close to a Robert Taft isolationist, a stance the party has rejected since World War II. He’s not only not a Reaganite small-government guy; he openly says he won’t touch entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Trump has always sounded a distinctly emollient note: “As Republicans, if you think you are going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you are going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen.” And he doesn’t really seem to care all that much about pandering to the anti-abortion or evangelical orthodoxy, which is why conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz are right to warn that there’s no guarantee that Trump would appoint a movement conservative to the Supreme Court.

While the apostate from New York has been grinding what remains of the modern GOP to dust, the Trump-splaining conservative elite has been pretending he will simply go away. Even more, they have been indulging in a fairytale: that this year’s GOP field was something special, a dream team of the right. In August, for example, George F. Will wrote, “This year’s Republican field is the most impressive since 1980, and perhaps the most talent-rich since the party first had a presidential nominee, in 1856. But 16 candidates are experiencing diminishment by association with the 17th.” No sooner did the New Hampshire caucus close with Trump as the winner than a phalanx of Republican panjandrums renewed such tired warnings about Trump as an interloper, a radical outsider who would tarnish the conservative citadel.

Exhibit A is the Wall Street Journal. Last Thursday its editorial page, which has historically functioned as a kind of conservative Politburo, bashed Trump for his heresies on eminent domain and property rights. “Mr. Trump,” it huffed, “is spinning property seizure as the price of admission for economic progress … but it isn’t true.” Meanwhile, Karl Rove exhorted on the Journal’s opinion page, “Messrs. Kasich, Cruz, Bush and Rubio must resist the temptation to go after one another—which only wastes vital time—and instead concentrate on Mr. Trump.”

Oh, dear.

The truth is that the pinprick strikes that the establishment conservatives are launching at Trump simply serve to underscore the party’s progressive enfeeblement. It was no accident, for example, that Marco Rubio, the neocon dauphin, has been exposed as a talking-points automaton. Trump’s other rivals may like to toss around words like appeasement to describe President Obama’s foreign policy, but they are facing their own political Dunkirk.

The final act of this Trumpian takeover of the party will come after the nomination, during the general election. That is when the party establishment and base will really find out who they have surrendered to—and just how heretical he really is. Trump will likely jettison the ideological baggage he’s accumulated during the primary and move the party back to the center. On foreign policy Trump gives every indication of balking at the crusading neocon prescription for intervention abroad. In this regard, he can tap into a venerable Republican tradition of suspicion of globalism. In 1950, for example, Herbert Hoover created a national furor with a speech attacking Harry S Truman’s cold war policies. Hoover said that there were limits to American power and that the U.S. should retreat from Europe and Asia and make “this Western Hemisphere the Gibraltar of Western civilization.”

Like Taft, who said that the “principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people,” Trump displays distinct unease about American allies. As the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. noted in the May 1952 Atlantic, there were two forms of isolationism that existed in America: “The one was moved by hope for America, the other by hatred of Europe. The one shunned Europe the better to change America, the other, the better to keep America from changing. The one sprang from American progressivism—from a belief that the American experiment was unfinished; the other, from American conservatism—from a belief that American society was complete, and that change meant not progress but disaster. “

Militaristic unilateralism is fine for a conservative nationalist like Trump who displays a macho Jacksonian attitude about American honor—calling Iran’s seizure of American sailors an “absolute disgrace” that evinced a “lack of respect for our country and certainly our president.” But he’s also made it clear that he’s ready to give Russian president Vladimir Putin a free hand when it comes to Ukraine. And when it comes to Syria he’s cast doubt about the rebels by implicitly backing Bashar al-Assad—“we have no idea who these people [are] and what they’re going to be, and what they’re going to represent.” Trump’s intense repugnance for allies is deeply rooted in the GOP and in American history. Trump’s truculent stands prompted the historian Max Boot, an adviser to Rubio, to complain in the February Commentary that both Trump and Cruz are turning “their backs on decades of Republican foreign policy, which has been internationalist, pro-free trade, pro-immigration, pro-democracy, and pro-human rights.”

It’s not quite that simple—Republican foreign policy has veered between the pragmatism of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to the truculence of George W. Bush—but Boot is definitely onto something: like it or not, Trump and Cruz do represent a return to the party’s older traditions. Republican grandees are responding by trying to paint Trump as some kind of closet leftist for having the temerity to question the Bush war on terror. On Monday, Sen. Lindsey Graham called Trump “the Michael Moore of the Republican Party,” and poor Jeb Bush echoed him. “I don’t get it,” Jeb said.

You hear a lot of leading Republicans use that phrase nowadays: “I don’t get it.” That’s because they don’t get it. All Trump is doing is simply telling the truth as Trump sees it, and what he says is resonating because while it may be wrong at least it is new, and other Republicans are pretending the old bromides still work. All of which is why the GOP is becoming unmoored by his candidacy.