One senator says, of Trump’s win, “I’m still in the first stage of grief—denial.” Illustration by Doug Chayka / Source: Andreas Praefcke (Dome); Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty (Trump)

Last month, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for President, and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, met at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, two blocks from the Capitol. Ryan, the Vice-Presidential candidate in 2012, is widely regarded in the G.O.P. as a policy intellectual and has fashioned himself as the guardian of conservative ideology. Trump, one of the most opportunistic candidates in the Party’s history, had just knocked out the last of sixteen Republicans who had, to varying degrees, campaigned on Ryan’s ideas. In July, at the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, Trumpism’s victory over Ryanism will create a potentially humiliating moment for the Speaker, who will serve as the chairman of the Convention, which will formally nominate Trump. The candidate’s visit to Party headquarters was akin to a general visiting a conquered territory. He was there both to survey the wreckage and to determine who, among the conquered, would prove loyal to his cause.

Outside the building, Representative Darrell Issa, a combative conservative ideologue from California, found his path blocked by several dozen activists from United We Dream, which advocates on behalf of undocumented young people. Some held makeshift signs calling Trump a racist or associating him with the Ku Klux Klan or the Confederacy, but many held up professionally produced placards reading, “The G.O.P.: Party of Trump.” Issa hopped a fence and raced up the street as if he were fleeing a crime scene. When a reporter ran after him, he ducked into a building.

The leader of the pro-Trump wing in the House, Chris Collins, of New York, was conducting an impromptu press conference on the sidewalk. Collins was the first of his colleagues to endorse Trump, switching his support from Jeb Bush, back in February. Now he criticized George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, both of whom have said they would not vote for Trump or for Clinton in the general election. “How an elected official can message to America, ‘Don’t vote’—I find that embarrassing for them,” Collins said. “These people are becoming irrelevant.” Like other Trump backers, he argued, “One on one, Mr. Trump is a listener. He’s not a talker. When he’s got a group of people, he wants to know what’s going on in other people’s districts.” If Ryan didn’t endorse the nominee, Collins said, he would lose the Speakership. “I have spoken to very few members who have said that they’re not on the Trump train.”

And yet it was hard to swing a boom mike without hitting a skeptical Republican. Charlie Dent, of Pennsylvania, who is a leader of the faction of moderate House Republicans called the Tuesday Group, said, “Donald Trump has to convince many Americans, including myself, that he’s ready to lead this great nation. He’s got to do that. At this point, I haven’t been persuaded.”

Tom Cole, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, earned a doctorate in British history before entering state politics. Cole has spent six years working with Ryan to fight the Tea Party wing in the House, opposing its government shutdowns and its destruction of Eric Cantor, the former Majority Leader, in 2014, and of John Boehner, Ryan’s predecessor as Speaker, late last year. After Boehner’s exit, with the Republican-controlled Congress in free fall, Ryan, under strong pressure from his colleagues, reluctantly agreed to take the Speakership.

For Ryan and Cole, Trump posed a different challenge. Insofar as Trump has fixed political positions, he disagrees with a majority of House Republicans, including Ryan and Cole, on foreign policy, taxes, entitlements, trade policy, immigration, and the minimum wage. He repeatedly talks about a tax policy that would be less generous to the wealthiest Americans, allow the government to pay down the debt, and keep Social Security and Medicare solvent, although the plan he has presented would do none of those things. Cole said, “It’s not as if the majority was created by Donald Trump. This majority was created much more by the views and vision that Paul Ryan laid out.” Cole said that he respects what Trump has accomplished as a candidate: “It’s an amazing achievement. I suspect, and I would hope, he respects what we did to win the majority.”

But he also noted that “politics is a very pragmatic business.” He went on, “The voters get to decide. They’re the ones that make the choices around here, and they’ve made it. So, looks to me like that’s a reality you adjust to and work with.” He seemed relatively untroubled by Trump’s statements that he would ban Muslims from entering the United States; deport eleven million undocumented immigrants; rewrite libel laws; reinstate the use of torture and kill noncombatants; and strengthen ties to Vladimir Putin while rescinding security guarantees made to our closest democratic allies.

After the meeting, Trump and Ryan issued a perfunctory statement declaring it “a very positive step toward unification,” but Ryan declined to issue a formal endorsement. Trump had put countless Republican lawmakers in excruciating political predicaments. Senator John McCain, who told me last summer that Trump had “fired up the crazies,” now needs Trump’s voters to support his own reëlection in Arizona—a state that Trump won by twenty-two percentage points in the primaries—and has said that he will support him. Marco Rubio, whose last days as a Presidential candidate were spent mocking the size of Trump’s hands and the orange hue of his face, recently apologized for the personal attacks, and said that he would speak on Trump’s behalf at the Convention. Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, another of Trump’s opponents early in the campaign, has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events. (One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order*.)

Ryan, who went on to endorse Trump on June 2nd, was the last major holdout. Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush, who has said that he can’t support the nominee, told me, “It’s noteworthy how few rank-and-file members have spoken up against Trump. I think that’s a mistake that people are going to regret.”

As Trump rose to the top of the polls last summer, the Republican Party turned out to be more at odds with its constituents than anyone had realized. Since 1964, when Senator Barry Goldwater was the Republican Presidential candidate, there has been wide agreement about the meaning of conservatism. The Party stands for lower taxes, less government, deregulation, free trade, and austere budgets. The debate has been about how much of the welfare state to dismantle, not whether it should be done. It was taken for granted that the same anti-government zeal that had fuelled the Reagan Revolution, of the nineteen-eighties; the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress; and the 2010 Tea Party insurgency would continue to drive the Party.

But Republican Presidential candidates have lost the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections. After Mitt Romney’s defeat, in 2012, the Republican National Committee assembled five political consultants and Party officials to study what had gone wrong. In March, 2013, the group released its findings, which the press immediately dubbed “the Autopsy Report.” The national party, the report said, was “increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.” The problem was especially acute among millennials and nonwhite voters. “Public perception of the Party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” The Party sounded “increasingly out of touch” and was “driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac.” The report called for “a more welcoming conservatism” and favorably quoted a Republican committeewoman who said, “There are some people who need the government.” But for the most part the authors didn’t challenge the Party’s neo-libertarian consensus about economics and the welfare state.