Just 12 months ago, it would have been unthinkable for Republicans to come out in public weakening their opposition to Obamacare. The first GOP presidential primary candidate to say so, it seemed then, would be tarred, feathered, and dragged through the streets.

But the idea of keeping Obamacare, or a system quite like it, is no longer heresy in the ideologically moderate Trump Republican Party. And it appears that a significant number of Republican officeholders, having seen Trump shockingly carry Midwestern states that no one thought he could win, have become emboldened to let their pale pastels show, at least on this key issue. As Bloomberg reports, Republicans are now dialing back their rhetoric, saying they wanted to "repair" the healthcare law rather than "repeal" or "replace" it.

From a polling perspective, it makes some sense. It's a majority view that Obamacare has serious problems, but that not every word necessarily needs to go. Some of the provisions are even popular. These are bad provisions, like guaranteed issue and community rating, but populist politics does not lend itself to educating people about the long-term consequences of bad policy.

This is the world we live in now — the same one in which House Republicans will likely vote soon to bring back earmarks.

Recall that as recently as 2013, a handful of Republicans actually shut down the federal government and even briefly played chicken with the debt ceiling in a hopeless effort to prevent Obamacare from going forward. It was a very divisive time for the GOP. The party's brand hit new lows as sharp ideological lines were drawn. Much of the party's base seemed ready to sacrifice what was still then only a potential Senate majority in order to eliminate the threat of socialized healthcare.

The great irony is that the Democrats are now getting exactly what they once pretended to want. The Republicans, they complained before with insincere concern in their voices, were no longer a party capable of governing. They were too scared or too ideologically committed to do anything that might risk angering the dreaded conservative base. This paralyzed them and committed them to an inflexible posture in one losing standoff after another on healthcare, taxes, and budgets.

But that base, at least as it existed then, is now just a memory. The groups that urged on the shutdown and enforced yesterday's orthodoxies have embraced an ecumenism of ideological toleration.

Trump has done what no other Republican could, stamping out the ideological fires of conservatism. Or rather, as firefighters use backburns to control wildfires in the West, he's set all the surrounding hillsides on fire to devour all the fuel in the main fire's path. The backfire has devoured not just everyone's news cycle but also most Republicans' concern for details about (for example) what the health insurance market is actually going to look like in 2025.

The GOP establishment — now flavored with its new bizarro-world Trumpian twist — has seized control of not only the party's reins, but also its ideological center.

Many conservatives feared this during the primaries. But even then, they viewed it through the lens of a losing Trump candidacy in a general election. This would be a temporary problem, and there would be time to pick up the pieces would and start putting everything back together. No one made plans for what would happen if Trump won.