If a Senate populist such as Tom Cotton had run on Trump’s identical platform, but without Trump’s tweets and bombast, most of the Never Trumpers would have sighed but voted for him. And if an earthy working-class sort had run — a man who felt at ease with the masses but, like a Romney or Reagan, held many orthodox GOP positions, the Trump base would probably have reluctantly supported him, too.

We are essentially left with just one cultural and class divide that characterized three groups within the Republican party: 1) new voters turned on to Trump by his attitude and brashness, 2) old voters turned off on Trump by his attitude and brashness, and 3) the vast majority that voted for Trump because they perceived him as at least marginally better than Hillary Clinton and what she represented.

Again, Trump is a symptom of widespread disgust, not the head of a carefully crafted ideological movement with a checklist of issues. What created him was furor at a smug, entrenched Republican political establishment. In a bout of virtue-signaling, this cadre had deliberately conflated opposition to illegal immigration with supposedly racist resistance to legal immigration, while damning principled conservatives as “nativist” and “xenophobes” simply for wanting existing laws enforced. It had preached free-market economics without worry for the losers of globalization, while many of its megaphones cashed in on the government-corporate-media nexus. And its prior presidents and presidential candidates had been reduced to mushy punching bags, strangely bragging about their own virtue in not responding to invective while their own supporters and defenders were left to be smeared and defamed. Worse yet, they caricatured the base voters who used to defend them while they themselves went on to defend, even if indirectly, their erstwhile critics.