Story highlights The election of Trump is, simply put, Ailes' greatest triumph

The question now is whether Ailes-ism can be a successful governing approach

Washington (CNN) The sudden death of Roger Ailes Thursday at age 77 means that the man who helped invent modern conservatism -- in all its hard-edged, unapologetic, media-bashing glory -- is gone.

But what Ailes built not only continues on but has realized its apex in the form of President Donald Trump.

Consider the conservative landscape pre-Ailes and the creation of Fox News Channel in the fall of 1996. It was, despite the grassroots landslide victory for the party in 1994, a party -- and a set of principles -- largely built around establishment conservative thinkers like Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley and George Will. The Heritage Foundation was the policy center of the party. The knock on the GOP was that it was composed of a bunch of pipe-smoking, out-of-touch elitists.

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Ailes changed all of that. With the charismatic and controversial Bill O'Reilly as its public face and Ailes as the strategic mastermind behind the scenes, Fox News Channel built its appeal on the idea that the mainstream media was full of East Coast elitists and liberals who not only ignored the concerns of the everyman but sneered at them.

Those elitists had used their media dominance to determine what the values of the country should be, values often at odds with what a majority of the middle of the country wanted them to be. And then they hid behind the shield of political correctness to insist that any view that didn't mesh with their own was small-minded and offensive.

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