Sykes and Noonan are on opposite sides of the looking glass: Sykes sees the Republican error as accommodating and exploiting proto-Trumpism for all these years, whereas Noonan sees the Republican error as not embracing it with sufficient fervor, allowing it to fester in unsupervised alienation. There is a coherent case to be made for either position. How much corporate blame you want to put on the GOP for Trump and Trumpism will necessarily reflect in large part your attitude toward the pre-Trump Republican modus operandi, and how much you think Trump is a unique and special case vs. how much you think he is an utterly predictable case of political emphysema after four packs of outrage a day for 30 years, Newt Gingrich with an inheritance instead of an education.

Everybody loves a good purge, but real progress means recruiting new allies and forming new alliances. And that is what the Trump movement in fact did, aligning the soft xenophobic tendency (anti-trade, anti-immigration) with the entitlement mentality (“Don’t touch my Social Security!”) and a whole Chalmun’s Cantina of social anxieties, while promising a salubrious purge (“Drain the swamp!”) of effete elitists who secretly run the world while being, at the same time, entirely irrelevant. That alliance worked, to an extent, in 2016. It didn’t work for George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, or Ross Perot, and it probably won’t work for Trump in 2020, but it might work again for somebody else in 2024. It may be electorally viable, but I wouldn’t want any part of it, and neither would a fair number of other people who were generally aligned with Republicans for the past 40 years or so. Are they enough to matter? We’ll have an answer on November 4, but that will not be the end of the disagreement.