Donald Trump may be getting the best gift of all this holiday season, as he enters 2016 firmly on top in the Republican race for the White House.

The GOP presidential hopeful has proved the doubters wrong, solidifying a double-digit lead in national polls while running one of the most unorthodox campaigns in history…

The poll numbers highlight how Trump has displaced President Obama as the central player on the political stage, with both parties reacting daily to his insults, tweets and attack lines.

“A madman,” “clown,” and “freak politics,” is how opinion-leaders in POLITICO’s fourth Transatlantic Caucus summed up the real estate tycoon and his controversy-filled campaign for the Republican nomination…

Concerns about Trump mirrored the group’s anxieties about the divisive rhetoric from European politicians. The Caucus rated “the rise of populist parties and threats to democracy” as the Continent’s third greatest threat after the migration crisis and Islamist terrorism — forces that have thrown into doubt the visa-free Schengen agreement, a cornerstone of the European Union…

One Caucus member said Trump’s candidacy offered only “moronic solutions to complex problems.”…

“It is not his candidacy, but the support he receives,” a Caucus member said, “like some extreme politicians in EU member states, including France.”

What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors—himself included!—as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite…

Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. “We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.”

He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. “If we’re going to have World War III,” he told The Washington Post in October, “it’s not going to be over Syria.” As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, “I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.”

He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. “I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

He promised above all to protect their wages from being undercut by Republican immigration policy.

For those on the traditional right, one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump’s ascendance is the sense that a man described by Jeb Bush, according to Politico, as “a buffoon” and a “clown,” has wrested control of their party, an institution they have spent five decades turning into the home of principled ideologues…

The dynamic interaction of three current trends — voter anger over immigration, over offshoring and robotization, and over damage wrought by the economic meltdown of 2008 — has been crucial to Trump’s success. Together, these developments have blown a hole in American politics. Trump, wielding ferocious rhetoric, has plowed through…

The “stark legacy of the recession and the lackluster labor market” are apparent in “reduced opportunity and deterioration,” according to the Dallas Federal Reserve. The number of men and women “not in the labor force” continues to grow, from 92.5 million in November 2014 to 94.4 million last month.

In other words, the stage has been set for Trump.

Phyllis Schlafly, an icon of the conservative movement who has been active for half a century, is warning the nation: Donald Trump is the last hope for America…

“It sounds like Donald Trump is the only one who has any fight in him,” she said. “He will fight for the issues that we really care about and are very hot at the present time, such as the immigration issue. I don’t see anyone else who’s eager to fight.”…

“He does look like he’s the last hope [for America],” Schlafly said. “We don’t hear anybody saying what he’s saying. In fact, most of the people who ought to be lining up with him are attacking him. They’re probably jealous of the amount of press coverage he gets. But the reason he gets so much press coverage is the grassroots are fed up with people who are running things, and they do want a change. They do want people to stand up for America. It really resonates when he says he wants to ‘Make America Great Again.’”…

“They are betrayed,” she said. “There’s no doubt about it. The working man and woman have been betrayed by both parties. They’re ready for a change … anything they think would be better.”

These words were written before the weak expansion of the 2000s collapsed into the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession of 2009. Before the crushing failure of the Republican Party’s anti-Obamacare “Waterloo” strategy. Before the shock of a second loss to Obama. Before a succession of default threats and government shutdowns ended in fiasco after fiasco. Before the GOP was outmaneuvered on taxes and immigration in 2013. Donald Trump throws around the word “losers” a lot. From the perspective of GOP voters, who deserves the title more than their own party leaders?

Trump presents himself as a big winner: rich, powerful, self-confident, his name on buildings and golf courses around the world. He makes great deals! (As perhaps you’ve heard him say a time or two.) Remember the question Bill O’Reilly used to ask when his show was gaining traction back in the 1990s? “Who’s looking out for you?” Trump offers himself as the answer to that question…

Trump voters … come from the much more numerous ranks of those who remain worse off today than they were in 1999. They want a strong leader who can and will keep faith with them. Who else in the GOP contest can plausibly make that claim?

Is there any message Trump could use to stop Cruz? There’s a pretty strong one, in fact. It’s one that undercuts Cruz’s central appeal as an “outsider” while reinforcing Trump’s central appeal as a right-wing populist. It portrays Cruz as another double-dealing politician and Trump as the guy who “tells it like it is,” so to speak, and it pits Cruz as a representative of the elite, coastal Republican class against which Trump’s campaign has sparked a working-class rebellion.

Trump can define Cruz as a Wall Street lackey, bought and paid-for by special interests, who will turn his back on the priorities of their overlapping base as soon as he’s in the Oval Office.

Cruz’s money doesn’t come from nowhere. According to a Yahoo Finance analysis in mid-November, 18.6 percent of the money backing Cruz—as in, campaign and super PAC contributions—comes from the financial industry. That was the fourth highest percentage of all presidential candidates, behind Gov. Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Sen. Lindsey Graham; in terms of hard dollars ($12.1 million), it was second only to Bush ($35.3 million.) Bush makes no bones about representing the will of the GOP donor class. Cruz does…

One of Trump’s most appealing traits to voters is that he cannot be bought, doesn’t need to raise money, and doesn’t need to curry favor in private with select interest groups. If he needed to court big-dollar donors, you wouldn’t hear him railing on so unreservedly against immigration or free trade or cuts to federal entitlement programs. As David Frum writes in a lengthy Atlantic piece this month, Trump has blown wide open the long-simmering feud between GOP elites, who typically control the party’s presidential nominating process, and GOP working-class voters, who have always fallen in line.

The ideological profile of the ideal Republican presidential candidate looks much the same now as it did before the 2008 election. Six in 10 Republicans nationwide, including independents who lean toward the GOP, want the party to nominate a conservative to represent it in 2016. About one in three want a moderate candidate, while support for a liberal is in the single digits.

These findings, from a Dec. 2-6 Gallup poll, are similar to the results from a December 2007 poll. The current party nomination contest is arguably different from the one that produced 2008 nominee Sen. John McCain. Yet the percentage of Republicans who prefer a conservative candidate is not.

It is as if Donald Trump just walked into a 40-year conversation on conservatism and instead of standing there, nodding his head politely as he got acquainted with the topic at hand, began shouting over the crowd.

It is essentially what Trump has done to conservative policy gurus this year. Trump has reached over anti-abortion diehards, foreign policy neocons, and supply siders to tell base voters directly what he thinks they want to hear and it’s working. But he still doesn’t have a grasp on how what he’s promoting fits into long-term movement conservatism objectives — nor does he seem to particularly care. Not only is Trump not beholden to the conservative movement, he seems more or less indifferent to it. And that as much as anything strikes fear deep in the hearts of longtime conservatives who see 2016 as a generational opportunity to control Congress and the White House simultaneously…

The problem for conservatives goes beyond Trump’s own positions, which over the years departed from the conservative orthodoxy. Trump lacks a basic sense of the values of the conservative movement, its jargon, or the deals struck over the years to hold the different elements of the movement together as a unified force…

“I think the conservative movement has waited long enough and if there are these concerns that Trump is not the full-orbed conservative he claims to be, then people need to be making that case,” says Doug Sachtleben. “It is not like we are left with no one running. There are good choices. That argues all the more for why the conservative movement should speak up.”

Ever since the modern-day conservative movement came together in support of Ronald Reagan’s candidacy in 1980, its leading intellectuals have tended to fall in line behind the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Sure, they would jostle before and during the primaries, with each pundit throwing his writing and thinking behind whichever candidate came closest to exemplifying the precise mix of personality traits and policy proposals he favored. But by the time the nomination was secured, party loyalty would kick in and the preferences of Republican voters and party bigwigs would get the final say. And that was okay, as far as the pundits were concerned, because no matter which candidate ended up at the top of the ticket, he was bound to be better than whatever Big Government liberal the Democrats had chosen to run against him.

But that won’t necessarily be true if Trump ends up as the nominee next summer. So what would the conservative pundits do?

Most, I think, would choose to go into exile, withdrawing their support, at least temporarily, from the Republican Party. And that would be an event every bit as significant as the split in the Republican electorate that a Trump candidacy would reflect and intensify. It would mark nothing less than the crack-up of the conservative movement as it’s been constituted for the past 35 years.

The real-estate mogul has demonstrated about as much familiarity with the U.S. Constitution as with the Bible, which is to say, none. Trump has captivated a share of the tea party with a style of politics utterly alien to the Constitution. In the year of Trump, the right is experiencing a post-constitutional moment…

For some on the right, clearly, the Constitution was an instrument rather than a principle. It was a means to stop Obama, and has been found lacking…

Trump transcends the usual fault lines on the right between fiscal and social conservatives, libertarians and hawks, or establishment and grass-roots conservatives. What he has done is to unmoor conservatism’s populism from its traditional ideological commitments, including those to constitutionalism and limited government.

A pure populism is inherently in tension with constitutional conservatism. The Constitution is a device for frustrating popular enthusiasms, as are federalism, checks and balances, and the rule of law. It’s why impassioned factions usually have very little patience for them, and why they are so central to checking government and protecting individual rights.

If the right’s devotion to them wanes, it will be a loss not only for conservatism, but for the American polity.

If the elites in the Party win – if they manage to oust the conservative base they apparently despise – the GOP becomes a hierarchy without a foundation. If the grassroots win, the GOP becomes an unorganized entity without the funding to run national campaigns…

Red state Republicans are perfectly happy to watch the federal government struggle through the Founders’ checks and balances; they don’t want a powerful central government. Blue state Republicans think that the struggles of checks and balances create unpredictability and thus financial insecurity, and worry that red state Republican social priorities alienate those who would side with them on cash issues.

The Republican Party will likely come down at some point in the near future. The question is whether we’re already at the breaking point. If Trump wins the nomination, we will be; if the establishment uses any nefarious means to deprive Trump or Ted Cruz of the nomination, we will be; if the establishment gets one of its favorites through a primary process that heavily favors establishment candidates, and that candidate loses to Hillary Clinton, we could be.

Until now, Trump’s ever-more-exotic effusions have had an almost numbing effect. Almost. But by his embrace of Putin, and by postulating a slanderous moral equivalence — Putin kills journalists, the United States kills terrorists, what’s the big deal, or the difference? — Trump has forced conservatives to recognize their immediate priority.

Certainly conservatives consider it crucial to deny the Democratic Party a third consecutive term controlling the executive branch. Extending from eight to 12 years its use of unbridled executive power would further emancipate the administrative state from control by either a withering legislative branch or a supine judiciary. But first things first. Conservatives’ highest priority now must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination in this, the GOP’s third epochal intraparty struggle in 104 years…

It is possible Trump will not win any primary, and that by the middle of March our long national embarrassment will be over. But this avatar of unfettered government and executive authoritarianism has mesmerized a large portion of Republicans for six months. The larger portion should understand this:

One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either.

For the anti-Establishment crowd, rejecting despair means, first of all, rejecting the impulse to “burn it down.” Because even John Lennon knew that “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” The answer to deficiencies in the Republican Party is never to voluntarily choose defeat or schism or outright retreat from the field. Sure, the anti-slavery Whigs did that, and were rewarded with one of this nation’s great accomplishments – but costs along the way were so ghastly we should not lightly re-live the 1860s. Walking away, or preferring defeat to teach a lesson, is never the path to victory. One more Senate win in 2006 or 2008, and we would not have Obamacare a decade later.

No, the answer instead is long, steady, wearying, patient engagement. It’s not always sexy, but with hard work we can take the tools we have to hand and make them gradually and incrementally better – and while the results are sometimes hard to see (being conservatives, many of our monuments are things that we prevented from happening), we have been steadily improving the party. You may not love Marco Rubio, but he is more conservative than George W. Bush, who was more conservative than Bob Dole, who was more conservative than Gerald Ford. You may not love Paul Ryan, but he is more conservative than Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), who was more conservative than Denny Hastert, who was more conservative than Bob Michel. You may not love John Roberts, but he is more conservative than Anthony Kennedy, who is more conservative than Harry Blackmun (I mean to do a fuller analysis of the Supreme Court some time, but just as an example, if you replaced Roberts and Kennedy with two more of Breyer and Ginsburg, you’d have no individual Second Amendment right to bear arms). And below the federal level, we have had far greater success, success that a Republican White House could free up just by getting out of its way.

Progress, I know, is frustratingly slow, and backsliding all too common. But that is the nature of a Republic – “if we can keep it.”…

We can get results. We can change the world together. And we don’t need perfect people in government to do it. I never thought I’d live to see the end of the Soviet Empire. I never thought I’d live to see the Democrats’ 40-year control of the House broken. I never thought I’d live to see New York City cleaned up of crime. All those things arrived after decades of failed or apparently failed attempts to bring them about; the steady stream finally broke the dam. It has been, perhaps, too long since we have seen those kinds of vivid results at the national level, but victory after long persistence can be the most rewarding kind of all.