Conservatives seeking to deny Donald Trump the Republican Party’s presidential nomination might fail, but it won’t be for lack of trying. These conservatives have attacked him from every conceivable angle, including with a variety of No True Scotsman-like claims meant to convince GOP primary voters that Trump is actually a pro-choice, single-payer-loving liberal in disguise.

In part because Trump is most popular among less-ideological Republican voters who don’t value philosophical purity, and in part because he is both affectively and positionally very conservative, with influential conservative celebrity backers, this genre of anti-Trump criticism has largely failed. At best, it may have succeeded in putting a not-terribly-low ceiling on his support.

But “Trump is liberal” is one of the only arguments conservatives can make that doesn’t implicate their movement in embarrassing ways or risk harming the party in the general election. One of the #NeverTrump crusade’s great ironies is that in trying to stop a candidate they perceive as an imposter, conservatives have embraced liberal assumptions and lines of attack that they would normally decry as baseless or risible.

It is perhaps revealing that in desperate times, conservatives will accept liberal assumptions about politics, culture, and media. But it is almost certainly the case that these are expedient, calculated positions, and that the same conservatives will re-embrace a more orthodox worldview as soon as the primary is over, no matter who wins.

In desperate times, conservatives will accept a number of liberal assumptions about politics, culture and media.

In conventional conservative doctrine, the mainstream press and much of the new media are little more than arms of Democratic Party officialdom. Also, bigotry and misogyny are no longer widespread problems, in the right’s telling—and to the extent that they still exist, they are no more prevalent on the right than on the left.