Bruce Bartlett has been on the congressional staffs of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp, worked for Ronald Reagan in the White House and at the Treasury Department for George H.W. Bush.

As a moderate Republican who voted for Obama, I should be Donald Trump’s natural enemy. Instead, I’m rooting for him.

The Republican establishment foresees a defeat of Barry Goldwater proportions in the unlikely event Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination. As Trump’s lead in the polls grows, so too does their panic. Yet, for moderate Republicans, a Trump nomination is not something to be feared but welcomed. It is only after a landslide loss by Trump that the GOP can win the White House again.


Trump’s nomination would give what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP a chance to reassert control in the wake of his inevitable defeat, because it would prove beyond doubt that the existing conservative coalition cannot win the presidency. A historic thrashing of the know-nothings would verify that compromise and reform are essential to recapture the White House and attract new voters, such as Latinos, who are now alienated from the Republican Party.

A best-case scenario would see the nation souring on the Democrats after three victories in a row, the most either party has achieved in the post-war era, and the election of a pragmatic Republican in 2020, unencumbered by the right-wing baggage essential for winning the nomination that dragged down John McCain and Mitt Romney.

The Trump phenomenon perfectly represents the culmination of populism and anti-intellectualism that became dominant in the Republican Party with the rise of the Tea Party. I think many Republican leaders have had deep misgivings about the Tea Party since the beginning, but the short-term benefits were too great to resist. A Trump rout is Republican moderates’ best chance to take back the GOP.

The Republican Party historically has been the party of the economic elite. There’s much truth in the old joke is that Republicans could never understand why they lost an election because all their friends at the country club voted Republican. The conservative movement, by contrast, largely consisted of small businessmen and country folk suspicious of anything that came out of the big city. The GOP and the conservative movement have always been uncomfortable allies.

William F. Buckley, long-time editor of National Review, the leading conservative journal, was famous for his vocabulary and use of big words. This was a conscious way of demonstrating that conservatives could be smart and urbane, not just a bunch of ignorant yahoos. In the 1960s, he cut many of the yahoos loose from the conservative coalition. He effectively banished the anti-Semites as well as the conspiracy theorists in the John Birch Society from the movement, distanced it from the extreme libertarianism of Ayn Rand and made peace with the Civil Rights Movement.

These actions made the GOP more palatable to conservative Jews and others who opposed the excesses of liberalism in the wake of the Great Society, but were repelled by the lack of education and sophistication exhibited by most conservatives. In the 1970s, Irving Kristol created “neoconservatism” as a sort of halfway house for such people, allowing them to abandon liberalism without throwing in with the uncouth conservative masses.

Republican leaders couldn’t stop the far right from briefly taking control of the 1964 convention and nominating Goldwater. But it ultimately proved beneficial to the party. The extremists had their chance and lost in one of the great blowouts in history. This chastened them and allowed regular party leaders to reassert control and nominate Richard Nixon in 1968, who proceeded to accommodate the Great Society by trying to make it work more efficiently, just as Dwight Eisenhower had done with the New Deal.

For a few years, this technocratic version of conservatism dominated the GOP. Perhaps without Nixon’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s defeat in 1976, the technocrats might have remained in control of the party. But just as Goldwater’s defeat was treated as a defeat for conservative ideas, the ignoble end to the Nixon and Ford administrations signaled a defeat for Republican moderates, who were tolerated by the conservative rank-and-file only as long as they won. In defeat, the party base had no patience for them.

From the ashes of the Ford defeat, a new group of Republican leaders epitomized by Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan revived a more full-throated conservatism. But they were not the sort of conservatives who ruled the party in 1964; they had learned from Goldwater’s defeat that uncompromising conservatism would not sell. They had also learned a lot about public policy from the neoconservatives and understood that it was not enough to stand on principle; conservatives also needed a workable program that could pass Congress if they hoped to succeed.

By the late 1970s, liberalism was intellectually exhausted and inflation, which naturally tends to benefit conservatives politically, had proven to be an insoluble problem. Not only did inflation make conservative attacks on the budget deficit and Big Government resonate more strongly, but it pushed workers up into higher tax brackets when they got cost-of-living pay increases. This made tax cutting a highly potent campaign issue for Republicans.

Although the far right’s mythology paints the Reagan years as the triumph of their ideas, the truth is that he governed very much in the moderate tradition of postwar Republican presidents. Reagan raised taxes 11 times, gave amnesty to illegal aliens, pulled American troops out of the Middle East, supported environmental regulations, raised the debt limit and appointed many moderates to key positions, including on the Supreme Court. But he skillfully kept his right flank protected by using thundering conservative rhetoric, even as he violated his own stated principles on a regular basis.

Hardline conservatives paint George H.W. Bush as a failure because he raised taxes in 1990 despite routinely giving Reagan a pass for much greater violations of conservative orthodoxy. In effect, Bush paid the price for Reagan’s heresies. His defeat was also part of a plan by the GOP’s most conservative members to take operational control of the party in a way that they had never been able to do before. Bush’s defeat was considered a small price to pay to put people like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay in charge of party policy.

The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 validated this strategy. The 1996 defeat of Bob Dole, a throwback to the Eisenhower-Nixon-Ford era (he was Ford’s running mate in 1976), was further validation.

Conservatives were not enthusiastic about George W. Bush in 2000, in part because they feared that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. But Bush knew that as long as he kept throwing tax cuts at the conservative base, he was free to pursue traditional moderate Republican policies in areas such as expanding Medicare, financial regulation, education, trade and the budget.

By 2008, conservatives were frustrated with their lack of substantive policy progress during the Bush years. Even the tax cuts that bought him their support were scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. In many ways, the rise of the Tea Party was as much a reaction to Bush’s infidelities to conservative principles as it was to the election of Barack Obama.

Since extremists of all types tend to flock together, the Tea Party, well financed by Charles and David Koch and other multimillionaire conservatives, welcomed groups formerly excluded from the political mainstream. These included xenophobes, racists, neoconfederates, anti-Semites, gun nuts, secessionists, conspiracy theorists, homophobic bigots, religious kooks, gold bugs and many others. What held this diverse coalition together was hatred of all things vaguely associated with liberalism and the prospect of political power, which was achieved after the Tea Party’s victories in the 2010 election.

With the Tea Party now in control of the Republican nominating process, where only a small number of activists participate, it became the tail wagging the GOP dog. No matter how dumb or demented Tea Party demands were, the Republican leadership had to accommodate them—there’s always time in the crowded legislative schedule for yet another vote to repeal Obamacare. Ideas such as shutting down the government or repudiating the national debt that were previously considered beyond the pale became standard Republican policy.

Frighteningly, fringe ideas began to become dogma even among GOP elites. For example, they came to believe that all reputable polls were biased against Republicans in 2012 and instead followed a crackpot who arbitrarily adjusted the polls to show them winning. All the scientific research showing global warming is denied as a liberal conspiracy even as sea levels have steadily risen. Every mass shooting becomes proof that more guns are necessary for average people to protect themselves.

These and other nutty ideas became staples of Fox News programming, which is the primary source of information for most conservatives, according to numerous polls by Pew and others. Among the critical roles played by Fox is to validate extremism and its proponents as mainstream conservative spokesmen. Whether motivated by ratings or ideology—the effect is the same—Fox encouraged the right-wing fringe and gave it a huge megaphone. No commentator appears too extreme to be banned from Fox and its anchors will almost never voice even a hint of criticism no matter what they say on air; all conservative views are legitimate on Fox, no matter how unhinged.

Donald Trump and Fox were a natural fit. For years the network gave him a platform from which to pontificate, in the process making him a political figure as well as a businessman and entertainer. He simply repeats on the campaign trail the bombast that earned him return trips to the Fox studios year after year.

It is reported that Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is less than pleased at the possibility of Trump as the Republican nominee. He can see the looming defeat. But Fox CEO Roger Ailes has continued to promote Trump because the Trump base and the Fox base are one and the same. It’s a no-lose situation—ratings are bumped and the GOP is pulled further to the right, Ailes’ twin goals in life.

But just as the GOP alliance with the crackpot Tea Party needs to be broken, so too does its alliance with Fox. The party is looking at an extended period out of the White House as long as it remains beholden to the Fox News-Tea Party agenda so well represented by Donald Trump.

Republicans have been delusional in thinking that control of Congress made them the governing party in the U.S. Without the White House, they control nothing. Conservatives’ own expansive theory of presidential power, sometimes called the “unitary executive,” confirms this fact. The American people may be willing to elect of few cranks and nutcases to Congress, where they are generally harmless, but they will not elect such people to be president because the stakes are so much higher.

Suffering a historic defeat in 2016, as it did in 1964, is a price the GOP must pay so that moderates can say to the extremists, “We gave you your chance and you blew it. Now it’s time to put the adults back in charge.” Nominating Trump is the best way to accomplish this goal.