Friends who voted for Hillary Clinton and friends who viewed her possible election with dread and foreboding have asked me to explain Donald Trump to them. Some have asked me if he is even a conservative. Many Trump supporters have tried to get me to agree that whatever Trump’s political persuasion may be the people he has been appointing are real conservatives.

I have given the same answer to them all. The thing about Donald Trump, I tell them, is that he is pro-American. As Publius Decius Mus wrote in his magnificent essay, “The Flight 93 Election”:

Trump, 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. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.

Democrats today proudly reject the idea of limited, constitutional government. They want to eliminate the Electoral College. They advocate a “living constitution”—which in practice means no constitution at all. They use governmental power to force schools to open the bathrooms and showers for girls to boys who “identify” as girls. They are determined to flood our country with people from third world countries who are not interested in the American idea and Muslims who reject the American idea outright. They are for open borders, and they welcome illegal immigration.

An America without the Constitution, without the Electoral College, without borders, ruled by bureaucrats according to the ever more absurd dogmas of political correctness is no longer America. And that is the whole point. The party of Obama and Hillary is the Anti-American Party. They want to put the American experiment behind us, to complete the Progressives’ 100-year project of progressively overthrowing the Constitution.

Donald Trump has called himself “a common sense conservative.” What, we may ask, is common sense conservatism? One thing is certain: it means loving America. Trump wants to save America by rallying the American people around the effort to save the republic.

The problem with the Republican Party is that it has been losing for so long it came to believe it could do no more than conduct a rear-guard action to cover a perpetual retreat. The Democrats have been, in Osama bin Laden’s phrase, “the strong horse,” advancing the Progressive agenda in wave after wave decade after decade for over a century, re-writing and ignoring the Constitution ever more boldly.

If Trump succeeds in re-founding the Republican Party, Americans would have a choice between a pro-American party capable of restoring the Republic and a party that is dedicated to submerging America in a globalist, international, post-American order. In any case, Trump has succeeded in clarifying the choice America faces. If America goes down, it won’t be because Trump stood aside and let it happen.

To save the Republic, we must make the American Idea clear to the American people, giving them the opportunity to choose it instead of the Progressive vision of a collectivist and globalist future utopia.