The Republicans went through the 2008 and 2012 cycles with the mainstream Republican candidates avoiding talking about that tally. If it hadn’t been for Trump, the 2016 cycle might have ended the same way. There were a lot of Republican voters who were disgusted and angry with how the Bush administration handled Iraq but who were uncomfortable with the libertarianism of the Paul family.
When Trump condemned the Iraq War, it seemed like finally someone on the stage (other than a Paul) was stating the obvious. He was also violating the unspoken norm that Republican commentary on Iraq should be easy on Bush and tough on Obama.
Because it was Trump, there was plenty of other — less defensible — norm-breaking. There was the nonsense about Bush having lied. There was Trump’s lying about having opposed the war from the beginning. There was Trump’s insane (and hopefully rhetorical) obsession with somehow stealing Iraq’s oil. God, it’s even worse than I remember.
But here is the problem: Having tried and failed to limit debate with an unspoken norm against harshly criticizing Bush, Republicans were in a poor position to attack Trump for violating other, more explicit norms in the course of talking about Iraq. It just made it look like the mainstream Republicans were looking for another excuse to shut down debate on Iraq (when that debate didn’t focus on Obama’s failures). That didn’t mean that Republican voters who supported Trump wanted to steal Iraq’s oil or see Bush impeached. It did mean that they forgave Trump those excesses because he was finally able to say some of what those voters had been feeling about George W. Bush’s conduct of the Iraq War.
A similar thing happened on immigration.
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