A small group of thinkers argue that Trumpism could be more than a political slur. Illustration by Barry Blitt

The most cogent argument for electing Donald Trump was made not by Trump, or by his campaign, but by a writer who, unlike Trump, betrayed no eagerness to attach his name to his creations. He called himself Publius Decius Mus, after the Roman consul known for sacrificing himself in battle, although the author used a pseudonym precisely because he hoped not to suffer any repercussions. In September, on the Web site of the Claremont Review of Books, Decius published “The Flight 93 Election,” which likened the country to a hijacked airplane, and argued that voting for Trump was like charging the cockpit: the consequences were possibly dire, but the consequences of inaction were surely so. Decius sought to be clear-eyed about the candidate he was endorsing. “Only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise,” he wrote. But he argued that this corruption was also evidence of a national crisis, one that could be addressed only by a politician untethered to political piety. The author hailed Trump for his willingness to defend American workers and America’s borders. “Trump,” he wrote, “alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live.” By holding the line on unauthorized immigration and rethinking free trade, Decius argued, Trump could help foster “solidarity among the working, lower-middle, and middle classes of all races and ethnicities.” Decius identified himself as a conservative, but he saved much of his criticism for “house-broken conservatives,” who warned of the perils of progressivism while doing nothing in particular to stop it. Electing Trump was a way to take a stand against both ambitious liberalism and insufficiently ambitious conservatism.

The essay was meant to provoke conservatives, and it succeeded. Ross Douthat, of the Times, responded that Decius had underestimated the likelihood that a Trump Presidency would damage both the country and the movement. On Twitter, Douthat wrote, “I’d rather risk defeat at my enemies’ hands than turn my own cause over to a incompetent tyrant.” The Web site of National Review, the eminent conservative magazine, published a series of critiques, including one by Jonah Goldberg, who called Decius’s central metaphor “grotesquely irresponsible.” No doubt Goldberg expected that, before long, he would be able to reminisce about that strange week, near the end of an endless campaign, when a blogger using a pen name was the most talked-about conservative columnist in America.

But for conservative intellectuals, as for so many others, November 8th did not mark a return to normalcy. A day and a half after Donald Trump was elected President, he flew from New York to Washington to meet with President Obama at the White House. Afterward, Obama expressed his hope, however faint, that Trump’s Presidency would be “successful.” In response, Trump expressed his belief, previously undisclosed, that Obama was “a very good man.” At the same time, about two miles east, in an auditorium at the headquarters of the Heritage Foundation, the well-connected conservative think tank, a handful of prominent conservatives gathered onstage to try to figure out their place in this new political order. Just about every seat in the auditorium was taken, one of them by Edwin Meese, Attorney General under President Reagan, who was in the front row, and whose phone was almost certainly the source of a pleasant symphonic ringtone that briefly intruded upon the proceedings.

Jim DeMint, the former senator from South Carolina, is the president of the foundation, and he was jubilant. DeMint’s current job, like his old one, requires a degree of ideological flexibility, and he had forged a close relationship with Trump. In March, Heritage published a list of eight worthy nominees for the Supreme Court; when Trump released his own list, in May, it included five judges from the Heritage slate. Addressing the audience, DeMint looked like a man who had won a long-shot bet. “What just happened, in this election, may have preserved our constitutional republic,” he said.

Some of the people onstage weren’t so sure. One of them was Goldberg, who had had an eventful year: his response to Decius was only one in a series of acerbic essays that had established him as a leading light of the #NeverTrump movement, a group of normally reliable partisans who said they could imagine voting for just about any Republican candidate—except one. This was in some sense a protest movement, albeit one led by a political élite. Its ranks included both National Review and its chief rival, The Weekly Standard, as well as most of the leading conservative newspaper columnists, countless scholars and policy wonks, and, quite possibly, the two Presidents Bush, both of whom declined to endorse Trump. Goldberg once called Trumpism “a radiation leak threatening to destroy the G.O.P.” and compared the candidate to “a cat trained to piss in a human toilet.” (“It’s amazing! It’s remarkable!” he wrote, mocking those impressed by Trump’s occasional displays of political poise. “Yes, yes, it is: for a cat.”) At the Heritage event, though, Goldberg tried to be magnanimous in defeat. “I am entirely open to giving Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “The #NeverTrump thing is over—by definition.”

Sitting next to him was John Yoo, who was a prominent Department of Justice official under President George W. Bush, and who had recently likened Trump to Mussolini. Glancing mischievously at Goldberg, Yoo said, “I don’t know if it’s over for him, though.”

“That’s true,” Goldberg replied, chuckling. “Tell my wife I love her, if I suddenly disappear.”

The speakers at Heritage that day differed in the degree of optimism they allowed themselves. All of them believed that Trump would likely nominate a suitably conservative judge to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. But when the host asked whether Trump might be “more sensitive and self-restrained” than Obama in the use of executive power, the room erupted in laughter. Yoo didn’t dismiss the idea. He imagined Trump, on the first day of his term, repealing all of Obama’s executive orders and agency regulations—an imperious way to make the Presidency less imperial. Goldberg, by contrast, insisted that, despite Trump’s declarations of partisan fealty, he was at heart “a lifelong Democrat from New York who likes to cut deals.” He argued that conservatives should make it their mission to keep President Trump in line—to insure that “he has to deal with us and get our approval on the important things.”

But why should Trump now heed a political movement that was unable to stop him? In May, he told George Stephanopoulos, “Don’t forget, this is called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party.” During the campaign, Trump declared himself a convert to some conservative causes, like the pro-life movement, while unapologetically spurning others: he excoriated the “Republican Establishment,” took a skeptical view of free trade and free markets, and shrugged at gay marriage and transgender bathroom guidelines. Trump’s popularity was undimmed by these transgressions, which led Rush Limbaugh to suggest, in one memorable broadcast, that “the Republican conservative base is not monolithically conservative.” If liberals were shocked, on Election Night, to realize that they were outnumbered (in the swing states, at least), then many leading conservatives must have been even more shocked to discover, throughout the year, that their movement was no longer theirs—if it ever had been. We have grown accustomed to hearing stories about the liberal bubble, but the real story of this year’s election was about the conservative bubble: the results showed how sharply the priorities of the movement’s leaders differed from those of their putative followers.