Confessions of a columnist

But in a strange way my negative view of both the G.O.P. and what Trump’s reactionary fans call “the Cathedral” — the whole liberal media-political-academic-entertainment complex — was a crucial part of why I assumed that Trump could not defeat them. The more time you spend complaining about a given feature of the political or cultural landscape, the more you can come to take its power and permanence for granted, to imagine that its decadence must be too resilient to overthrow.

In the case of the G.O.P., that decadence was the party’s “Reagan yesterday, Reagan today, Reagon forever” commitments, which seemed to me misguided but powerfully entrenched, so that an assault on party orthodoxy as frontal as the one that Trump mounted would eventually forge a defensive unity among the party’s politicians and ideological enforcers.

As indeed it did — in exactly one place, the Wisconsin primary. But everywhere else, from the talk radio dial to the halls of Congress to Fox News, Trump’s assault revealed that the party’s would-be statesmen were mostly hollow men and its enforcers were mostly ratings-hungry cynics. I had thought that the G.O.P. was run by true believers in a dated catechism. But really it was run by people for whom the Reaganite catechism only mattered because they controlled the inquisition, and once Trump’s army of heretics refused to disperse they had no stomach for a fight.