The Kentucky Wildcats, elated with their 2002 win over the LSU Tigers, gave Coach Guy Morriss a celebratory Gatorade shower. Unfortunately, there were still 11 seconds left in the game. LSU used those precious seconds to run a play that was the football equivalent of a Republican winning the Rust Belt. LSU beat Kentucky by 3 points that day.

Kentucky was devastated. And Guy Morriss — as if losing weren’t bad enough — had to do his post-game interviews soaking wet. The Wednesday morning after the election, every talking head in America looked like angry, humiliated, dripping-wet Guy Morriss.

Thanks to Trump, we now have empirical evidence that abandoning the party base is not the secret sauce that turns states red.

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When it seemed like the Republican Party might never recover from President George W. Bush’s big spending and neoconservative foreign policy, Donald Trump — like Reagan before him — created a new Republican coalition.

The mainstream media isn’t afraid of Donald Trump because they think he’s dangerous. They’re afraid of him because he’s a Republican who appeals to working-class Americans and because he’s a pragmatist who is against unnecessary military interventions.

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Of course, the best way to destroy a Republican coalition is by throwing a Bush at it, but here are three more ways some Republicans of the Old Guard will try to destroy the new coalition.

1.) Open the back door and let the neocons in!

The 2016 election was a 200-decibel repudiation of neoconservative foreign policy.

They made up a large portion of the teeny-tiny elitist group known as NeverTrumpers. And while they’re rare among walking-down-the-street type people, they’re all over the media and scattered generously throughout Congress. People like George Will, John McCain, Bill Kristol, and others failed to stop Trump in the primaries. They failed to steal his nomination at the Republican National Convention; they failed to convince him to step down as the nominee. But now that he’s president, they will ask him to fill the Cabinet with neocons — and then grumble if he fails to do so.

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George Will, who did everything he could as a NeverTrumper to get Hillary Clinton elected president, but failed — is now quite interested in helping Trump with the Cabinet. He’s pushing Kelly Ayotte, a neocon senator who lost her New Hampshire seat — due in no small part due to her lack of support for Trump.

While in the Senate, Ayotte fought alongside Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham in favor of any military intervention imaginable.

The neocons are obsessed with the notion that Donald Trump is dangerous, but it is — and always has been — they who are dangerous. They believe in spending the lives of our soldiers and trillions of dollars trying and failing to install democracies in faraway lands.

“She’d be a big help to the new administration,” a National Review writer stated.

According to The Washington Post, she’s a candidate for secretary of defense. According to the article, “Ayotte would stand out in a Trump administration as a neoconservative defense hawk and one of the few women in the incoming Trump Cabinet.”

There were 17 candidates to choose from in the GOP primary. Every neocon went down. At the end, the only Republican candidate left standing was the one who said, “We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” That’s the guy who won. The voters sent a direct anti-neocon mandate.

George W. Bush’s terrible neoncon foreign policy nearly destroyed the GOP. Trump doesn’t need to build bridges in order to make the neocons happy. He needs to slam the White House door in their faces.

2.) Forget the American people the corporations and the special interests.

The multinationals were kicking back in their shades loving life — back when all signs were pointing toward a Bush vs. Clinton election. Hillary wouldn’t have had to flip-flop on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The candidates could have gone all over the country arguing about who loved free trade the most and who could sign the most free trade deals and open up access to the cheapest labor.

Unfortunately for multinationals, both parties were tired of it and two working-class populist movements emerged. As we know thanks to WikiLeaks, the Democrats cheated to stomp out their populist uprising. The Republican uprising is now in the process of creating a Cabinet.

Over and over in the lead up to the election, we heard jabbering heads echo the idea that Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are fool’s gold for Republicans — never having any idea that opposition to NAFTA and the TPP might make a difference there, in the region where both parties had previously agreed it was fine to auction off the peoples’ jobs to the lowest bidder.

Stop fighting for the working class, and that Rust Belt will be blue again before you know it.

3.) Whatever you do, don’t stand up for anything!

The media has conditioned Republicans to believe that the only way to win a presidential election is to disavow the party’s base and embrace progressive values. The Republican Party has been pounded by the media and the Democrats into believing that conservative positions are losing positions.

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John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and tons of so-called Republican strategists said over and over that Trump couldn’t win. He’s “divisive.” Issues divide people. Campaigns are about disagreement — so they’re divisive by nature. These people believe some magical spot exists on the political spectrum where everyone comes together and agrees. It doesn’t. All they’re really doing is tossing out all of their leverage before negotiations even start, defining their surrender as unification, and then patting themselves on the back because the media praised them.

Thanks to Trump, we now have empirical evidence that abandoning the party base is not the secret sauce that turns states red. Republicans should wrap Trump’s coalition in bubble wrap and treat its lessons as fragile, precious gifts. The party will wind up in pieces quickly if they don’t.

Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College and a regular LifeZette contributor.