After destroying Jeb Bush, Trump turned his attention to Rubio, a candidate who was Kempian in tone and affect. “I ask,” a visibly exhausted Rubio said in his Florida speech, “the American people do not give in to the fear, do not give in to the frustration.” Actually, if the Trumpian plurality in the Republican electorate has anything to say about it, fear and frustration will be high on the nation’s agenda in the fall.

Trump’s iteration of the Republican party won’t have a bleeding heart; it will be out for blood. Far from eschewing negative campaigning, personal abuse will be its calling card. It will care less about policy than attitude and shibboleths. Electorally, it will repel minorities and hope to run up the score with whites. It won’t have an open hand on immigration but will talk of mass deportation. It won’t care about human rights, and in fact will be happy to violate them — or threaten to — as the national interest and a desire for vengeance dictate.

The politics of Jack Kemp were inadequate in many ways — he was wrong on immigration and too obsessed with reliving the glory days of the Reagan tax cuts — and the party was due for a populist refurbishing. Yet Kemp represented a belief in the future and the power of ideas that was admirable and, at its best, invigorating.

Today, the most prominent representative of Kempism is the supply-sider’s former protégé House speaker Paul Ryan, an earnest policy wonk who has advocated Kempian ideas for years. At this moment, it looks like his reward may well be presiding over a Republican convention that crowns Trump as the party’s nominee and most important national voice.