Can Trump lead a conservative movement he barely understands?

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.

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“If you are a more traditional conservative, someone who has been active in issues like abortion or tax policy and market regulation yeah I could see some of those people being quite anxious about Trump because he is a total wild card,” said Matt Dallek, an professor of political management at George Washington University who studies the conservative movement. “They don’t know him and he doesn’t know them. It is not clear that he supports their policies on many issues. Conservatives who have been successful politically, did not spend years shouting from the hill tops.”

Typically, Dallek says that candidates who catch conservative lightening in a bottle do so because they have spent years building a network and immersing themselves in the lingo. Take Ronald Reagan, for example, who Dallek says spent years talking to conservative organization and emerged out of the anti-communist and pro-market wings of the conservative party or Pat Robertson, the 1988 evangelical challenger to George H.W. Bush, who emerged from the Moral Majority movement.

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Trump has come right out of left field.

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