Two weeks from Election Day, the polling aggregators rate Donald Trump’s prospects of winning the presidency at somewhat less rosy than a snow cone’s chance in Hell. His impending humiliation is already engendering regular prognoses about the horrors of a Trump afterlife, but this is mere foreshadowing. When Trump finally loses, the country’s entire pundit class will squint into the entrails of his vanquished campaign to divine his future influence over the Republican Party. Here’s the truth: There will be none.

Paul Krugman, in his Monday column for The New York Times, is the latest to press the case for a long post-2016 hangover. With or without the frothing menace as its figurehead, he writes, the Republican Party has been remade in Trump’s image; going forward, its voters will only support fabulists who denigrate minorities and traffic in dark warnings of a rigged electoral system. “Trumpism is what the party is all about,” Krugman argues. “The underlying nastiness is now part of Republican DNA.”

But that’s exactly backwards. Republicans have been serving up nasty, fact-free delusions to an increasingly white base for decades now. That’s how Bill Clinton was sold as an international drug kingpin who murdered Vince Foster and Barack Obama was found to be “palling around with terrorists.” The Southern Strategy of spinning racial prejudice into conservative victories was first deployed nearly 50 years ago, and the great American tradition of right-wing conspiracy theorizing goes back a lot longer than that. Trump didn’t invent the intrinsic tendencies of the Republican Party, he simply exploited them. He didn’t create the Willie Horton ad, he just hired the guy who did.

Trump’s major contribution was to offer himself as the GOP’s perfect vessel: a lying, screaming prophet of American decline. If the party’s primary voters were content to merely pull the lever for a candidate who compared homosexuality to bestiality or decried the Common Core as anti-American propaganda, they could have voted for Rick Santorum or Rand Paul. There were 16 different flavors of conventional crazy for sale in the early stages of this election cycle—candidates who not only checked all the right boxes on supply-side tax cuts and abortion restriction, but also pandered to right-wing paranoia and white identity politics.

The Republican electorate didn’t want them. Long addicted to the narcotic of tribal antipathy, they sought its undiluted essence. Trump, who vocalized their grievances so openly that even party luminaries denounced him for it, was happy to act as supplier. In working the Republicans’ con game better than they ever could—in emasculating and disqualifying their candidates on the debate stage, exactly as they’d previously attempted with their Democratic rivals—he represented a distilled Republicanism mercifully stripped of its AEI white papers and perfunctory “minority outreach.”