It is Rubio who has embraced Dubya and his frightfully damaged legacy as if it were the greatest inheritance of all, and Rubio who channels Bush’s cocky and Christian compassion more than anyone else in the field. Rubio, more than anyone, would set out to follow in Bush’s foreign policy footsteps. Rubio, one feels, has already memorized his rousing address unveiling his signature guest worker program.

And in the greatest reminder of W.’s stubbornness, Rubio seems unwilling to believe that he has now been taken host by the problem that Bushism is. Team Rubio, buoyed along by its staunchest supporters, seems intransigent in its conviction that the Trump insurgency is fueled by human scum, which must only be scraped off the bottom of the party boot heel for the GOP to be rid of them forever. There is zero awareness that the base has come unglued at last from the loyalty to the Bush years it has labored under for so long. Worse, there is not even an intuition that just a little repudiation could go such a long way.

Is there a way of getting through to Rubio before Jeb’s fate befalls him too? Probably not. Rubio, already the prisoner of a hubris feedback loop that demands and rewards increasingly messianic behavior, believes that he has eliminated not only Bush but Cruz from contention. If he can beat Cruz in evangelical-rich South Carolina, he can beat him anywhere! John Kasich, meanwhile, strikes Team Rubio as ridiculously un-Bush — a ’90s-era process guy given to quasi-pantheistic free association and a bro-hug take on the soft humility Bush politically discarded after 9/11.