How hard it is to let go of a lovely illusion. Those of us with memories of high-school civics classes, Frank Capra movies with regular-guy heroes standing up for what’s right, the televised Watergate hearings (where Sam Ervin, a senator of the old, jowly southern school, preached the Constitution as if he had it for breakfast every morning), and the soothing bromides of newspaper columnists long gone to those ink-gray clouds in the sky—we half believed that, for the good of the party and the nation, the Republican establishment would step in to prevent Donald Trump from securing the nomination. That there was still a vestige of adult supervision. This was more than wishful thinking and graveyard whistling. An influential history of the nominating process, The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform, by Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller (University of Chicago Press, 2008), had documented persuasively that party insiders were the ones running the show. Not this time. After Trump was elected, some of us dreamers sought consolation in the prospect that the marble institutions of Washington, D.C., the archipelago of bureaucratic fiefdoms, and the robed justices of our court system would inhibit the Incredible Sulk from twisting the Republic out of recognition. Although the quick slapdown by the courts of Trump’s initial Muslim ban was heartening, it’s dwarfed by how much Trump has been able to get away with (the rogues’ gallery Cabinet picks; the taxpayer-covered, crony-infested weekends at Mar-a-Lago; the nefarious firing of F.B.I. director James Comey), and how masterfully he’s been able to damage America’s standing in the world just by being his wonderful self.

Unlike the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and the post-9/11 George W. Bush, Trump 1.0 hasn’t received a unanimous “Hail, Caesar!” from those in his own party, however. Some who heckled him before heckle him still. To them, Trump doesn’t deserve a honeymoon period—he’s too destructive a bridegroom. These faithful upholders of conservative principle and Republican tradition deserve a nod from those of us in the opposing dugout. For theirs is a lonesome lot, a larger estrangement. Those on the liberal-Democratic side of the great divide are able to pool our anger, fear, and frustration, knowing there are millions who feel likewise and are taking medication. To be a conservative Republican who refuses to swear allegiance to the Trump imperium and follow the red-carpet path of Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, and so many others into slavish finkdom is to be out of joint with a party rejoicing in victory and disparaging anyone not with the program as “cucks,” the go-to slime word of the alt-right. The anti-Trump dissenters will eventually be vindicated, as dissenters usually are, but “eventually” can last a lot longer than you think, and laurels to those able to hang tough.

Former C.I.A. operations officer, independent conservative presidential candidate in 2016, and persistent thorn in Donald Trump’s grasping paw (earning the nickname “McMuffin” from the insulter in chief), Evan McMullin is like the heroic swelling music in The West Wing’s opening credits come to life, answering the nation’s call to duty. He and his former running mate, Mindy Finn, are the founders of Stand Up Republic, which has taken out ads urging a congressional investigation of the Trump-Russia ties. A conservative like they don’t hardly make no more, if I may wax Elizabethan, McMullin has opposed the malignant authoritarian strain of white nationalism that Trump rode in on and continues to exploit, using his Twitter account as a distress caller while maintaining his practiced cool. McMullin’s steadfastness to constitutional values and inclusive dialogue are a model for us all (very Obama-ish, with fewer octaves), but every once in a while you want, you need, a hand grenade rolled into the tent to flush out the enemy and create a ruckus. That’s where Rick Wilson, veteran hand-grenade roller, comes in. Unlike the Mormon McMullin, Wilson doesn’t work PG. A Republican political consultant and media strategist based in Florida, where they play extra not-nice, Wilson goes for the jugular and the groin, once describing some Trump supporters as “childless single men who masturbate to anime.” (This may be a mite unfair. Surely some of these Trumpy anime wankers are married men indulging in a little “me time.”) Along with manning his Twitter machine-gun nest, Wilson releases longer barrages, such as “White House Death Match: Plutocrats vs. Racists” (the Daily Beast, April 28, 2017), which provided a breakdown of the battle royale between the capitalist overseers from Goldman Sachs in their Teflon suits and the Steve Bannon Breitbartian slob brigade lurching hither and yon, armed with “a stubborn belief that their beloved bullshit tornado was a substitute for governance.” Sadly, the bullshit tornado persists even with Bannon on the back burner, produced by Trump’s heaving desperation.

One of the chewier ironies of the Trump interregnum is finding that I’m following former foes on Twitter and elsewhere that I once mocked, reviled, and cast into outer darkness during the Bush presidency, especially after the invasion of Iraq. Jennifer Rubin, for example, how un-hallowed was her name: first, as a shill for Bush-Cheney and Israel at Commentary magazine, and then, after she was hired as The Washington Post’s in-house conservative blogger (“Right Turn”), as a brazen fangirl for the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012, Rubin propagated cheesy propaganda at the expense of journalism. Under Trump, she has found her journalistic duende. “Right Turn,” which Rubin reloads online several times a day (no one has ever doubted her zealous work ethic), is a dependably straightforward and woodpecker-relentless drilling of the rotting ghost ship of the Trump presidency. Max Boot, military historian and journalist, is another member of the neocon camp who has mounted up against the geopolitical fecklessness of Trump, and there are times, I confess, when I even find myself nodding in agreement with the anti-Trump gibes of Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of The Weekly Standardand one of the archbishops of neoconservatism. I feel a little dirty inside when I do—Kristol has been an instrument of calamity for so long—but he’s so damned unfailingly genial, and his darts at the Trumpian menace are never less than deft. In contrast, headmasterish George Will, a bow-tied edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, has always fashioned himself as a more classical conservative of the William F. Buckley Jr. cadet academy in his many decades as columnist, TV-panel pundit, and baseball bard. A consistent, caustic critic of Trump’s, he was shown the exit door at Fox News, where his contract as a commentator was not renewed; during the same personnel shake-up, the network hired the xenophobe and Brexit zealot Nigel Farage, filling the gap in its illustrious lineup with a frog-faced interloper.