When I asked Feehery what the party needed to do to get back on track, he paused and said, “I’m not sure it’s fixable.”

Despite what liberals might think, Trump’s success in capitalizing on voter animosity to immigration and to political correctness has shocked many conservative Republicans.

Matthew Continetti, the editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon, warned in a column on Dec. 11, “The Party Divides: A Trump nomination would be the end of the GOP”:

Homegrown terrorism, demographic panic, racial tension, income stagnation, and Trump’s persona may catalyze a political realignment along the lines we have seen before in our politics and see currently in Europe’s.

Continetti goes on to ask:

Have conservatives and Republicans thought through what would happen next? What choices we might have to make? Or are we too afraid to acknowledge the possibility that the movement and party to which we belong is no longer our own?

Reihan Salam, executive editor of National Review, told The New Yorker:

Trump is not someone I consider an ideal candidate — he does not represent my line of thinking. But he is proving that certain beliefs the professional political class had about who Republican primary voters are — what they respond to, what they care about — were just incorrect.

For those on the traditional right, one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump’s ascendance is the sense that a man described by Jeb Bush, according to Politico, as “a buffoon” and a “clown,” has wrested control of their party, an institution they have spent five decades turning into the home of principled ideologues.

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, looks at Donald Trump and does not see a conservative. Together with Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor, Lowry wrote in the October 19 essay “Trump Wrongs the Right” that Trump:

basically never says “freedom” or “liberty.” He gives no indication of caring about the Constitution. He talks only sparingly about the federal debt. He has, in short, ignored central and longstanding conservative tenets that seemed to have become only more important in the tea-party era — and he has not only gotten away with it, but thrived.

Although “Trump is not a conservative and does not deserve conservatives’ support, Republicans can nonetheless learn from him,” Lowry and Ponnuru write. He

has exposed and widened the fissures on the American right. If conservatives are to thrive, they must figure out how to respond creatively, sensibly, and honorably to the public impulses he has so carelessly exploited.

Lowry and Ponnuru make a point similar to Feehery’s:

The fact that Trump’s polling did not suffer even a modest drop after his soak-the-rich comments should tell other Republicans that the priorities of the donors they meet at fundraisers are not the same as those of the voters whose support they need.

Trump, the survivor of many financial ups and downs — including four Chapter 11 corporate bankruptcies – has emerged as uniquely positioned to capitalize on the thwarted aspirations and economic vulnerability of much of the electorate.

The extended aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008 has given Trump the opportunity to exploit a political opening: the shift to the right that predictably follows such crises. A recent research paper, “Going to Extremes: Politics After Financial Crises, 1870-2014,” argues that financial crises like the Great Depression of the 1930s and the recent prolonged recession push voters in a conservative direction and allow right-wing parties in Europe to flourish.