The Republican Party is in deeper trouble than the improbable loss of a Senate seat in Alabama suggests.

The source of that trouble dates back to July 19, 2016, when it accepted Donald Trump as its nominee for president.

On the surface, the GOP would appear to be in fine form, controlling as it does most state legislatures, governors' mansions, Congress and the White House. In a purely numerical sense, in terms of elected offices held, it is in a stronger position nationwide than at any time since the 1920s.

But this is deceptive, because political parties ultimately have to both represent clearly defined principles and produce leaders who are willing to at least occasionally put party interests above their own.

Alas, it becomes difficult to identify the principles of a party that has been the victim of a hostile takeover by a populist without any. The GOP is in danger of becoming less a political party in the traditional sense than an organizational vehicle of convenience for Trump's unconstrained ego.

The linkage between political parties and party leaders has historically operated in either of two ways--by parties united by shared values producing like-minded leaders, or leaders creating parties as bases of support for their political ambitions (for example, the Gaullist Party in France).

The first relationship is more common and durable because it's based on shared ideological orientation, the second more ephemeral because it's precariously tied to the political fate and mortality of a charismatic individual.

What we witnessed with the GOP last year fits into neither category and is thus unprecedented--the actual takeover of one of the world's oldest political parties with a once clear ideological purpose by an outsider with no discernible ideology against the wishes of virtually the entire party leadership.

The Republican Party has overcome some major challenges over the course of the past century, including that long walk in the wilderness following Herbert Hoover's defeat by Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon's resignation in disgrace over Watergate, but at no point was in danger of losing control of what it stood for.

To the contrary, the GOP retained its capacity for renewal precisely because it retained its ideological identity. And that identity, consisting as it did of a belief in free enterprise and individual liberty under limited government, was the ultimate guarantor of its political success because of being much closer to the ideological vision of the American founding and to the key elements of our political culture than the ersatz socialism that the Democrats had come to embrace.

Within this context, any exploration of the American founding and our founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist essays) necessarily constitutes an education in the conservatism that the GOP claims to stand for.

The ironic aspect in all this comes in realizing that Trump in less than a year has actually crossed off many of the items on any conservative wish list--originalist justices (including Neil Gorsuch on the high court), deregulation, withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, and now tax reform.

ISIS has been destroyed far more rapidly and decisively than anticipated, the economy is growing at a more robust rate than in a decade, and the stock market, that ultimate expression of American dedication to free market principles, has enjoyed one of its best years ever.

That promised wall hasn't been built (and might never be) and the attempt to repeal Obamacare was a dismal (albeit predictable) fiasco, but on just about everything else, from taking on racial preferences and supporting Israel to expanding energy exploration and ditching net neutrality, the Trump administration has been a conservative fantasy and liberal nightmare.

So why, then, has support for Trump among Fox News viewers, reliable indicators of conservatism, dropped according to a recent USA Today survey by 32 points over the past six months, the same period when the administration was producing conspicuously conservative results?

The answer to that question brings us back to the fact that political parties, whatever their origins or nature, come to be defined by those who lead them, which in the American context means their presidents. That presidential "branding" also far outlasts their terms in office (again, think Hoover, and later, more beneficially, Ronald Reagan).

As such, even many who have labored prodigiously up till now to defend him may finally be realizing that the only principle to which Trump is dedicated is the advancement of Trump; that he wouldn't hesitate at any juncture to pursue his interests as he saw them at the expense of both their party and the core values that have sustained it.

For Trump, the GOP has never been more than an instrument of his own ambition, to be used when useful, ignored when not, and discarded when no longer needed.

Having handed their party over to a man who views it as disposable in the greatest unforced error in electoral history, Republicans are now at his mercy, their future held hostage to his daily tantrums and fluctuating whims.

And if, as seems likely, fed-up Republicans fail to re-nominate him in 2020, he will go third party and hand the presidency to the Democrats.

Just out of spite.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 12/25/2017