Thus, in debunking the GOP’s hollow men and bringing the Bush-Cheney era to a close, Trump is essentially kicking in a rotten door. Today it would take the political equivalent of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory that just detected the waves predicted by Einstein to discern any fresh ideas in the black hole that constitutes the GOP. Into that void Trump has strode with all the hubris of one who recognizes weakness when he sees it—and is only too happy to call it out. His mockery of everything from GOP financiers—“nothing conservative about the Club for Growth coming into my office and demanding a $1M contribution, which naturally, they did not get”—to his palpable contempt for figures such as Bush indicates that his aim isn’t simply to win the nomination, but to redefine the party in his own image.

That won’t be hard, because it is an empty vessel. What is Trump filling it with? The irony of the new darling of the party’s disenchanted base is that his open divergence from the putative ideology of that base is near-complete. Trump preaches Trumpism; he doesn’t seem to care at all what the official party doctrine is supposed to be. Trump is not only not a neocon; he’s something close to a Robert Taft isolationist, a stance the party has rejected since World War II. He’s not only not a Reaganite small-government guy; he openly says he won’t touch entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Trump has always sounded a distinctly emollient note: “As Republicans, if you think you are going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you are going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen.” And he doesn’t really seem to care all that much about pandering to the anti-abortion or evangelical orthodoxy, which is why conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz are right to warn that there’s no guarantee that Trump would appoint a movement conservative to the Supreme Court.