Pity the Reformicons, if you can. The loose network of relatively young conservatives who adopted that label, including writers such as David Frum, Reihan Salam, and Yuval Levin, have, for more than a decade, decried the Republican Party for allowing the donor class to write its policies even as it relied on working-class voters for its electoral success. Republicans, they argued, were fixated on a stale Reagan-era agenda of cutting taxes, reducing regulations, and trimming Social Security and Medicare benefits, none of which addressed the struggles of their base.

The Reformicons pointed to the nomination of Mitt Romney, a businessman with a background in finance who was pushing corporate tax cuts, as an example of all that was wrong with the Party. If only a Republican candidate could offer the working and middle classes something more than reductions in upper-income tax brackets, they said, maybe the Party could finally win the White House. After Obama’s reëlection, in 2012, when debates about the G.O.P.’s uncertain future were particularly heated, the Reformicons seemed to represent a promising path for entrepreneurial Republicans who might be considering a run for President.

In 2013, the Republican National Committee produced a much discussed “autopsy report,” the result of a months-long examination of how the Romney campaign had lost the White House. The report concluded that the Party’s problems could be addressed by reaching out to Hispanics, with comprehensive immigration reform, and to women and millennials, with less divisive language on social issues like gay marriage and abortion. The authors, however, had little to say about the Party’s neo-libertarian economic agenda, a point raised by some Reformicons who argued that the R.N.C. had failed to address the elephant in the room. At some point, they argued, the Party’s base was going to revolt against its donor class.

It is one of the great ironies of modern American politics that the candidate who most closely followed the advice of the Reformicons, a group of young and idealistic intellectuals, was Donald Trump, an authoritarian bigot. Trump disregarded the tax-cutting orthodoxy of Republican élites, promised not to touch entitlement programs, and railed against the economic establishment and big donors. His child-care plan, which, with all its shortcomings, includes federal subsidies and paid maternity leave, was precisely the kind of policy the Reformicons have been urging Republicans to adopt.

Trump became the Frankenstein’s monster of Reformicon candidates, taking on the group’s respectable positions—such as skepticism about the economic benefits of immigration—and rendering them into an indefensible state. Frum, the author of “Why Romney Lost,” told me, “I feel like I’m living within a nightmare version of my hopes for conservative reform, with everything from immigration restriction to more infrastructure investment horribly twisted and distorted.”

This presents a dilemma for any conservative hoping to salvage Reformicon ideas from Trumpism. The candidate has been the opposite of Midas—every policy that Trump has touched has turned to dust. The next economic populist to come along in the Republican Party with Trump-like views—whether on immigration, trade, taxes, entitlements, or criminal justice—will be regarded with deep skepticism.

This was brought powerfully home over the weekend, when the Trump campaign sent out a press release opposing the proposed merger of A.T. & T. and Time Warner. “Donald Trump will break up the new media conglomerate oligopolies that have gained enormous control over our information, intrude into our personal lives, and in this election, are attempting to unduly influence America’s political process,” the press release said. It went on to claim that, at the Times, “strings are being pulled by Mexico’s Carlos Slim, a billionaire who benefits from NAFTA,” and that “Amazon, which controls the Washington Post, profits from the flow of illegally subsidized foreign products through its distribution channels.” (Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013.) It also claimed that Comcast, which bought NBC in 2009, in a deal that attracted much scrutiny from regulators, is using its news subsidiaries to “engage in their Never Trump tactics.” (The largest conservative media empire, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., was left off Trump’s enemies list.)

As Phillip Longman argues in a new piece in Washington Monthly, “taking on monopolists” could be part of a Reformicon agenda. The merger is complicated, and it’s unclear whether there’s a strong antitrust case against it, but there is a long and proud history of antitrust activism in the G.O.P., which ended in the Reagan era. As Longman argues, this might appeal to the Party’s economically struggling base, as well as to many other American voters. But, as with so many other issues, the Trump campaign took a promising idea and turned it into a threat, in this case to use governmental power to exact revenge on large media companies.

The Reformicons have never been a very powerful force in the G.O.P., but in the post-election fight over the fate of the Party they have a new enormous obstacle: Donald Trump. It won’t be easy to overcome.