The Republican Party was torn asunder by a populist media personality running a nationalist campaign based on immigration restriction, protectionism, and an anti-internationalist foreign policy. Initially dismissed as a bigoted crank, this upstart presidential candidate managed to humiliate the GOP establishment, led by the Bush family.

This is not just a description of the 2016 elections. It also happened in 1992.

Unlike Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan didn’t win the nomination, but his protest candidacy garnered more than two million votes and intensified fractures in the party that led to defeat in the general election. Buchanan’s candidacy provides a crucial context for understanding not just the roots of Trumpism, but also it’s likely future—even, or especially, if Trump loses to Hillary Clinton in November.

One of the biggest mistakes pundits make about Trump is to treat him as a historical fluke: an outlier who, thanks to a large primary field and his own celebrity, managed to take over one of America’s two main political parties. This fatal error caused everyone from FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver to rival candidates to underestimate Trump when he entered the race last year. They believed his meteoric poll numbers would return to Earth, following the same trajectory as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich in 2012.

Trump decisively won the nomination, yet many still treat him as an interloper who doesn’t represent, or have much in common with, the Grand Old Party—a sort of political Phoenix, the mythical bird that was self-generated with no parentage. Others, like columnist George Will, even flirted with the fantasy that Trump was some sort of deliberate subversive. “If Donald Trump were a Democratic mole placed in the Republican Party to disrupt things, how would his behavior be different?” he asked in July, and answered his own question: “I don’t think it would be.”