According to a certain type of Republican, the party has lost its way under President Trump. This is the foundational premise of the self-styled Never Trump Republican but also reliable fodder for high-profile op-eds in national publications. Last week, longtime Republican political strategist Stuart Stevens wrote exactly this kind of piece for The Washington Post, arguing that the Republican Party has lost its moral compass under this administration and “stands for all the wrong things now.”

“[I]t’s President Trump’s party now, but it stands only for what he has just tweeted,” Stevens wrote. “A party without a governing theory, a higher purpose or a clear moral direction is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate that exists only to advance itself. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.”

The op-ed was well received by the liberal press: Stevens appeared on left-leaning media outlets, and notable Democrats like David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, called the piece “searing.”

But for marginalized people who have been on the receiving end of the long-standing Republican racism and fury, Stevens’s claims about a party set tragically adrift by a racist opportunist was a gross oversimplification of political reality. Trump’s particular style of white grievance may be different in presentation from what came before him, but the party Stevens is mourning spent decades building the scaffolding he used to climb to the presidency. Republicans like Stevens aren’t sounding the alarm on an emerging moral crisis—they’re fighting back a public relations nightmare.

In her book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide, Dr. Carol Anderson wrote that white rage is not only about visible violence, “but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly.” Ever since the Dixiecrats switched allegiances, white grievance and anger have formed both the base and the primary political motivation of the Republican Party. Trump has decades of examples to draw from—and he has.