The point here is that Trumpism did not replace conservatism. The former rose from the latter. The GOP saw Democrats as illegitimate Americans long before Trump. The GOP did not abandon its principle either. As I said, the principles animating Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are the same ones that animated Johns Calhoun and George Wallace . The point here is that Wilson, Schmidt and Conway played a rose in that rise. It’s hard not to laugh a little at their attempt to sound, um, liberal. The Republicans, they wrote, “daily undermine the proposition we as a people have a responsibility and an obligation to continually bend the arc of history toward justice.”

—John Stoehr, in “Actually, No. Trumpism Did Not Replace Conservative Ideology”