If anything, these solo flights may have weakened the anti-Trump cause inside the GOP. Other elected officials view occasional Trump critics such as Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, who are retiring, and Representative Mark Sanford, who lost a primary, less as an inspiration than as a warning. “The individual ad hoc attacks on Trump aren’t effective, and they are potentially counterproductive because it allows Trump to isolate the people who are doing it,” says Peter Wehner, the former director of strategic planning in the George W. Bush White House. “And if they are defeated in a primary or retire, that amplifies the perception that no one can take him on.”

There’s no easy solution to that dilemma. But history suggests the first step may be to find strength in numbers. In recent decades, other factions disaffected with their party’s direction have amplified their influence by coalescing and creating their own institutions. Probably the best-known recent example is the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which party centrists formed after Ronald Reagan routed old-style liberal Walter Mondale in 1984. For the next two decades, the DLC developed a wide range of innovative domestic and foreign policies and nurtured candidates committed to rethinking traditional liberalism. Its influence peaked when Bill Clinton, one of the group’s architects, won the Democratic nomination and the presidency in 1992.

That precedent isn’t exactly analogous to the situation facing Trump’s GOP critics, because the DLC developed while Republicans held the White House—that meant the group could press its case without confronting a president from its own party. A more precise analogy may be the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a group of national-security hawks who fought Jimmy Carter’s arms-control efforts with the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. While the group was bipartisan, many of its leading voices were Democrats—such as Paul Nitze and Jeane Kirkpatrick—who openly and repeatedly broke from Carter.

While both of these groups’ goals were controversial, their impact was undeniable. The CPD proved a huge headache for Carter and the DLC fundamentally shifted Democratic thinking on a wide array of issues during the 1990s. Most relevant to the current GOP debate over Trump, prominent party members, including elected officials, became more comfortable expressing dissenting views when they could do so under the umbrella that these groups provided, rather than standing alone in the gale.

That’s exactly what Kristol and the GOP operative Sarah Longwell now hope to replicate with their group, Defending Democracy Together, which they launched with several allies last spring. The group has separate projects defending immigration, free trade, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation; and it plans to launch a “Republicans Against Putin” initiative. It has run ads defending Republican senators who have supported Mueller and quoting Ronald Reagan’s praise of legal immigration and free trade. But the organization is still operating at modest scale. “So far, we are doing things that are nicking at Trump,” Kristol acknowledges.