Occupied Territory

One senator says, of Trump’s win, “I’m still in the first stage of grief—denial.”Illustration by Doug Chayka / Source: Andreas Praefcke (Dome); Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty (Trump)

Last month, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for President, and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, met at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, two blocks from the Capitol. Ryan, the Vice-Presidential candidate in 2012, is widely regarded in the G.O.P. as a policy intellectual and has fashioned himself as the guardian of conservative ideology. Trump, one of the most opportunistic candidates in the Party’s history, had just knocked out the last of sixteen Republicans who had, to varying degrees, campaigned on Ryan’s ideas. In July, at the Republican National Convention, in Cleveland, Trumpism’s victory over Ryanism will create a potentially humiliating moment for the Speaker, who will serve as the chairman of the Convention, which will formally nominate Trump. The candidate’s visit to Party headquarters was akin to a general visiting a conquered territory. He was there both to survey the wreckage and to determine who, among the conquered, would prove loyal to his cause.

Outside the building, Representative Darrell Issa, a combative conservative ideologue from California, found his path blocked by several dozen activists from United We Dream, which advocates on behalf of undocumented young people. Some held makeshift signs calling Trump a racist or associating him with the Ku Klux Klan or the Confederacy, but many held up professionally produced placards reading, “The G.O.P.: Party of Trump.” Issa hopped a fence and raced up the street as if he were fleeing a crime scene. When a reporter ran after him, he ducked into a building.

The leader of the pro-Trump wing in the House, Chris Collins, of New York, was conducting an impromptu press conference on the sidewalk. Collins was the first of his colleagues to endorse Trump, switching his support from Jeb Bush, back in February. Now he criticized George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, both of whom have said they would not vote for Trump or for Clinton in the general election. “How an elected official can message to America, ‘Don’t vote’—I find that embarrassing for them,” Collins said. “These people are becoming irrelevant.” Like other Trump backers, he argued, “One on one, Mr. Trump is a listener. He’s not a talker. When he’s got a group of people, he wants to know what’s going on in other people’s districts.” If Ryan didn’t endorse the nominee, Collins said, he would lose the Speakership. “I have spoken to very few members who have said that they’re not on the Trump train.”

And yet it was hard to swing a boom mike without hitting a skeptical Republican. Charlie Dent, of Pennsylvania, who is a leader of the faction of moderate House Republicans called the Tuesday Group, said, “Donald Trump has to convince many Americans, including myself, that he’s ready to lead this great nation. He’s got to do that. At this point, I haven’t been persuaded.”

Tom Cole, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, earned a doctorate in British history before entering state politics. Cole has spent six years working with Ryan to fight the Tea Party wing in the House, opposing its government shutdowns and its destruction of Eric Cantor, the former Majority Leader, in 2014, and of John Boehner, Ryan’s predecessor as Speaker, late last year. After Boehner’s exit, with the Republican-controlled Congress in free fall, Ryan, under strong pressure from his colleagues, reluctantly agreed to take the Speakership.

For Ryan and Cole, Trump posed a different challenge. Insofar as Trump has fixed political positions, he disagrees with a majority of House Republicans, including Ryan and Cole, on foreign policy, taxes, entitlements, trade policy, immigration, and the minimum wage. He repeatedly talks about a tax policy that would be less generous to the wealthiest Americans, allow the government to pay down the debt, and keep Social Security and Medicare solvent, although the plan he has presented would do none of those things. Cole said, “It’s not as if the majority was created by Donald Trump. This majority was created much more by the views and vision that Paul Ryan laid out.” Cole said that he respects what Trump has accomplished as a candidate: “It’s an amazing achievement. I suspect, and I would hope, he respects what we did to win the majority.”

But he also noted that “politics is a very pragmatic business.” He went on, “The voters get to decide. They’re the ones that make the choices around here, and they’ve made it. So, looks to me like that’s a reality you adjust to and work with.” He seemed relatively untroubled by Trump’s statements that he would ban Muslims from entering the United States; deport eleven million undocumented immigrants; rewrite libel laws; reinstate the use of torture and kill noncombatants; and strengthen ties to Vladimir Putin while rescinding security guarantees made to our closest democratic allies.

After the meeting, Trump and Ryan issued a perfunctory statement declaring it “a very positive step toward unification,” but Ryan declined to issue a formal endorsement. Trump had put countless Republican lawmakers in excruciating political predicaments. Senator John McCain, who told me last summer that Trump had “fired up the crazies,” now needs Trump’s voters to support his own reëlection in Arizona—a state that Trump won by twenty-two percentage points in the primaries—and has said that he will support him. Marco Rubio, whose last days as a Presidential candidate were spent mocking the size of Trump’s hands and the orange hue of his face, recently apologized for the personal attacks, and said that he would speak on Trump’s behalf at the Convention. Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, another of Trump’s opponents early in the campaign, has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events. (One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order*.)

Ryan, who went on to endorse Trump on June 2nd, was the last major holdout. Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush, who has said that he can’t support the nominee, told me, “It’s noteworthy how few rank-and-file members have spoken up against Trump. I think that’s a mistake that people are going to regret.”

As Trump rose to the top of the polls last summer, the Republican Party turned out to be more at odds with its constituents than anyone had realized. Since 1964, when Senator Barry Goldwater was the Republican Presidential candidate, there has been wide agreement about the meaning of conservatism. The Party stands for lower taxes, less government, deregulation, free trade, and austere budgets. The debate has been about how much of the welfare state to dismantle, not whether it should be done. It was taken for granted that the same anti-government zeal that had fuelled the Reagan Revolution, of the nineteen-eighties; the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress; and the 2010 Tea Party insurgency would continue to drive the Party.

But Republican Presidential candidates have lost the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections. After Mitt Romney’s defeat, in 2012, the Republican National Committee assembled five political consultants and Party officials to study what had gone wrong. In March, 2013, the group released its findings, which the press immediately dubbed “the Autopsy Report.” The national party, the report said, was “increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.” The problem was especially acute among millennials and nonwhite voters. “Public perception of the Party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” The Party sounded “increasingly out of touch” and was “driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac.” The report called for “a more welcoming conservatism” and favorably quoted a Republican committeewoman who said, “There are some people who need the government.” But for the most part the authors didn’t challenge the Party’s neo-libertarian consensus about economics and the welfare state.

America’s demographic changes made the project of reforming the Party more urgent. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term, the electorate was eighty-eight per cent white and two per cent Hispanic. In 2012, as the report noted, when Romney was defeated, it was seventy-two per cent white and ten per cent Hispanic. The only recent Republican who seemed to understand the crisis was George W. Bush, who, by running a campaign that anticipated many of the Autopsy Report’s recommendations, won at least forty per cent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. Romney, who recommended “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants, won twenty-seven per cent of the Hispanic vote, the Party’s worst showing since 1996.

“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a G.O.P. nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence,” the report said. “It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

Party committees generally serve one purpose: by providing money, opposition research, voter data, and get-out-the-vote operations, they help candidates get elected. Especially in the case of contentious issues about which their own elected officials are divided, they rarely endorse legislation. But the R.N.C. was making a major policy recommendation. “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” Comprehensive immigration reform sounds vague, but in Congress it had a specific meaning: a deal between Democrats and Republicans that included guest-worker programs, heightened border security, and amnesty or a pathway to citizenship for many of the eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

By July, a bipartisan group of eight senators, including McCain, who believed he lost the 2008 race partly because of the Party’s poor showing among nonwhites, and Rubio, who was preparing to run for President, had pushed a comprehensive immigration-reform bill through the Senate with fourteen Republican votes. Some of the consultants who wrote the Autopsy Report started laying the groundwork for the Presidential campaign of Jeb Bush, who, like Rubio, used the report as a campaign blueprint.

Then the immigration bill moved to the House, where a faction of conservative Republicans has been in a state of rebellion against its leadership since the election of 2010, when the Tea Party backlash against Obama helped Republicans win the House. If there was a single moment when the Party of Paul Ryan began to turn into the Party of Donald Trump, it may have been July 10, 2013, the day House Republicans held a special meeting in the basement of the Capitol to debate whether they should take up immigration reform.

Paul Ryan stood before one microphone and Tom Cotton, a thirty-six-year-old freshman congressman from Arkansas, stood before another. Ryan, who spoke first, argued for passing a version of the Senate bill, saying that reforming the immigration system would strengthen the economy, supplying U.S. companies with a steady number of immigrants to take jobs that other Americans didn’t want. Cotton, who is tall and scrawny and loves partisan combat, delivered an unexpectedly sharp rebuke. He told me that he condemned the Senate bill for giving priority to “the illegal immigrant population” over the plight of “natural-born citizens and naturalized citizens who are out of work” and warned his colleagues that Republican voters were against immigration reform. Cotton was eying a Senate seat in deep-red Arkansas, where voters were strongly opposed to it. He led the House opposition to the Senate bill, and Boehner, then the Speaker, decided not to bring the bill to the House floor.

Cotton, who has said that he would not rule out becoming Trump’s running mate, had a modest upbringing in the small town of Dardanelle before attending Harvard and Harvard Law School. He spent two years working as a law clerk in Houston and as a lawyer in Washington before joining the Army. In June, 2006, he sent an e-mail to the Times from Iraq, criticizing the reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau for an article they had written exposing a Treasury Department program to thwart terrorist financing. Cotton called for the reporters to be jailed for interfering with security operations and violating espionage laws. The Times didn’t publish the letter, but it was posted on a conservative blog, and turned the young soldier into a minor hero on the right.

Cotton told me that the Autopsy Report, the Senate, and Paul Ryan had it all wrong. “There’s no issue on which élites in both parties are more disconnected from the American people—in both parties—than immigration.” The conclusions of the Autopsy Report have become an article of faith among the consultant and donor class, but Cotton laid out an alternative argument, citing data from exit polls and even margins of error. George W. Bush won his historic forty per cent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 almost without a mention of immigration. John McCain made immigration reform a centerpiece of his 2008 Presidential campaign and received thirty-one per cent of the Hispanic vote. Four years later, Romney talked about “self-deportation” and won twenty-seven per cent. “It didn’t seem to hurt him nearly as much as you might’ve expected,” Cotton said. “So, whatever it is that we can do to appeal to Hispanic voters, it would seem, is independent of what we do on immigration.”

The corollary to this view of the effects of an anti-immigration platform is that Republicans can appeal to Hispanics with an economic message. “If you’re a first-generation Guatemalan working in northwest Arkansas, legal, you’re working for Tyson or something, maybe you’re working for a landscaping company or something, maybe your wife is a nanny or something, you have the same concerns as the white guy living down the road from you,” Cotton said. “By and large, you want a job that pays a decent wage and some benefits and some prospect for advancement. You want safety on your streets so you don’t have to worry about crime against your family. You don’t want radical terrorists to blow up the mall when you go shopping for back-to-school clothes for your kids.”

Henry Olsen, a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who is writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, argues that the Autopsy Report’s recommendations badly understated the severity of the G.O.P.’s crisis. “The establishment approach to overcoming this problem is to do a little bit of tarting up, put on a nicer image, say you care a little bit more, talk more about poverty, and people will move over to your side and endorse your core agenda,” Olsen said. He cited polls showing that Latinos and millennials support Obamacare and a larger role for the federal government. “They like a whole bunch of things that the standard Republican platform is not for.” The early favorites in the 2016 Republican field were Autopsy Report candidates, especially Jeb Bush. Several of those favorites, including Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker, were even mentioned in the report as models for the Party’s future. Then Trump jumped into the race and promised to build a wall to keep out Mexican rapists and provide more, not fewer, government services.

On May 13th, the day after the Trump-Ryan summit, nine of the twenty Republicans who chair committees in the House released a statement pledging fealty to Trump and asking “all Americans to support him.” The man who organized the effort was Tom Price, the chairman of the Budget Committee. Price is a sixty-one-year-old orthopedic surgeon who represents a wealthy district in suburban Atlanta. In the Georgia primary, Marco Rubio won Price’s district, one of only two in the state not captured by Trump. Price is close to Ryan, and he is frequently mentioned as a candidate for a House leadership position.

Price has been committed to cutting taxes for the very wealthy, supporting international free-trade deals, and making deep cuts in Medicare and Social Security. How could he get behind Trump, who, in one of the few TV ads he has run this year, promised to “save Social Security and Medicare without cuts”? Like others in the Party who have made the endorsement, Price seems to have convinced himself that Trump will be malleable, and that Price will have more leverage than Republicans who wait. “I think we will work hand and glove, I really do,” he told me on May 16th. “When I talk to people who work closely with Trump, what they tell me is that behind closed doors he’s one of the best listeners they’ve ever worked for or with in their life. Which is kind of counterintuitive given what some of his public persona is.”

“I’m halfway to my goal.”
Cartoon by John McNamee

Price has turned into something of a Trump super fan, akin to Chris Christie. He even compared Trump to Reagan. He pointed out that the Reagan realignment took a few decades. “It took a Goldwater race in 1964 and then a Nixon appreciating that the Republican Party had a constituency broader than what had been conventional in the past,” he said. “And then the philosophical ideological nature of Reagan bringing together the three large groups”—fiscal, social, and national-security conservatives—“to prevail in 1980.” He added, “Mr. Trump is absolutely unconventional in how he came to this role and to this position.” Although the current upheaval “takes some digesting, both emotionally and intellectually,” given the state of the Party “that’s what absolutely must occur.”

In early May, as the margin in the polls separating Trump from Hillary Clinton tightened, more and more Republicans sounded like Price. The so-called Never Trump movement struggled to find a third-party alternative, after prominent anti-Trump Republicans, such as Mitt Romney and Senator Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, declined to run. Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, one of the last Republican moderates from New England remaining in Congress, supported Jeb Bush in the Presidential primaries. When the choice effectively came down to Ted Cruz and Trump, she had a slight preference for Trump.

“With Ted, I’ve seen over and over again his playing to outside groups rather than trying to work with his colleagues,” she told me on May 6th. “Those are words I probably should not say, since he’s going to come back and be one of my colleagues.” She said, “But I think, because I know Ted Cruz, and I don’t know and have never met Donald Trump, that with Donald Trump I hope he can minimize his weaknesses, change his approach, knock off the gratuitous personal insults, and draw on his strengths.”

Collins agrees with Price that Trump’s victory signals a historically significant political shift in the Party. Maine’s paper mills have been closing in the past few years, and she has become more skeptical about free trade than she used to be. “There’s a feeling that’s very strong in my state,” she said, that trade deals have benefitted large corporations and hurt working people. “I understand completely why that resonates.” Republicans argue that free trade lowers consumer prices. “Well, if you no longer have a job, lower consumer prices don’t really do you a whole lot of good. You’d rather have the job.” She was unhappy with Ryan’s austere budgets, especially those which cut assistance to workers affected by free trade.

Collins told me that she was still not ready to endorse Trump, and asked me to call her before publication “if things change dramatically.” She said, jokingly, “If he says, ‘On Day One I’m going to drop a bomb on North Korea,’ ” she wanted a chance to respond. “I mean, with him, you just don’t know.”

Other Republicans have found the Trump candidacy more difficult to come to terms with. “I’m still in the first stage of grief—denial—like a lot of my colleagues,” Jeff Flake, a senator from Arizona, told me on May 4th. Flake, who has a strong libertarian streak, outlined the choices he was considering: “Find a way to get behind the nominee, or say ‘Still Never Trump’ and look for a third-party candidate, or go into the booth and make your own choice, or embrace Hillary, and say, ‘We’ll fight this four years from now.’ ” He went on, “Frankly, I don’t know where I am.” Several days later, his senior colleague in the state, John McCain, chastised members of Congress who did not support the nominee. Most Republicans could not imagine supporting a Democrat. “But, by the same token, trying to imagine supporting Donald Trump—a Donald Trump that doesn’t back away from some of the positions that he’s taken—I can’t fathom that, either,” Flake said.

I asked Flake what he hoped would happen in the Trump campaign. “I guess the dream would be for Trump to get to a mike today and say, ‘I was just kidding on all this stuff!’ ” he said. He laughed, then continued, “If he were to say, ‘No, I really can’t leave my business. I’m going to let the Convention choose somebody else’—now, that would be a dream.”

Before supporting Trump, most Republicans must overcome doubts about his temperament, his ideology, his reckless statements, his questionable respect for the Constitution, and his potential to repel a generation or more of young and nonwhite voters. But, late last month, former Trump skeptics and those who are holding out the possibility of support seemed to unite around the belief that defeating Hillary Clinton is more important than any long-term effects Trump may have on the Republican Party. Prominent House members who have been frustrated by Obama’s willingness to use executive power on issues like immigration saw Trump as a useful instrument. Senator Collins and others were hopeful that Trump would somehow shed his most offensive behavior. Even people like Flake, who found supporting Trump unfathomable, wouldn’t rule it out.

Charlie Dent told me that he remained unhappy with Trump’s “lack of policy specificity, and the general tone and tenor of the campaign, and the never-ending statements that offend P.O.W.s, people with disabilities, Mexicans, Muslims, women, of course, the David Duke debacle”—a reference to Trump’s initial refusal to reject the support of the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. Nevertheless, Dent said, “One thing I’ve learned in politics is never say never. I think that’s probably good advice for Donald Trump: Never say what you’ll never do.”

Still, there is a minority of the Party’s officeholders who have concluded that the only principled response to Trump’s candidacy is to declare that they will never support him. The most prominent example in the Senate is forty-four-year-old Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, who wrote an award-winning doctoral dissertation at Yale on conservative coalitions from the nineteen-fifties through Reagan’s election. From 2010 until 2014, he was the president of Midland University, a small liberal-arts school in his home town of Fremont, Nebraska. Sasse served briefly in the Bush Administration, but for most of his career he was a management consultant, who spent more than a decade at Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey, advising large companies that were grappling with rapid technological change. “I’m drawn to stuff that’s broken,” he told me. “That’s how I ended up here.” The Senate race was his first political campaign.

In February, Sasse posted an open letter on Facebook in which he described the First Amendment as “the heartbeat of the American Constitution,” and listed the ways that Trump had threatened the American idea: his attack on libel laws, his support for the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, his praise of Putin, his call for an anti-Trump conservative journalist to be banned from television and fined by the F.C.C., and his push for “closing areas” of the Internet. “A presidential candidate who boasts about what he’ll do during his ‘reign’ and refuses to condemn the K.K.K. cannot lead a conservative movement in America,” Sasse wrote, believing that other Republicans would join him.

On May 4th, when Trump became the presumptive nominee, Sasse posted again on Facebook. “I’ve ignored my phone most of today, but the voice-mail is overflowing with party bosses and politicos telling me that ‘although Trump is terrible,’ we ‘have to’ support him, ‘because the only choice is Trump or Hillary,’ ” he wrote. Arguing that “there are dumpster fires in my town more popular than these two ‘leaders,’ ” Sasse called for a third-party alternative, but, despite pleas from the Never Trump movement, he refused to run himself. “I have little kids, and I’m an engaged dad,” he told me.

When I sat down with Sasse three weeks later, he was sick of talking about Trump. But he continued to describe both Trump and Clinton as unacceptable candidates. Many of his colleagues see Trump as “a lesser-of-two-evils choice,” Sasse said. “I think if it’s merely a lesser of two evils then the American experiment has already lost. We live in a civic republic, and you have to be recognizing that voting is also an act of signalling about the ideal, about what America should be in twenty-five years. I don’t want more candidates like Donald Trump. So I can’t vote for him just because he’s not Hillary Clinton.”

The most prominent anti-Trump Republican in the House of Representatives is Reid Ribble, of Wisconsin, and he is retiring this year. Ribble, the owner of a commercial roofing company, was an exemplar of the Tea Party class of 2010. Fed up with Obama’s stimulus and health-care policies, he ran for office and defeated a Democratic incumbent. Despite the Tea Party’s pugnacious reputation, Ribble, who attended divinity school, is soft-spoken, and is known in the House for his speeches about improving discourse between the two parties. He speaks earnestly of “Wisconsin nice,” and is proud that the state voted against Trump in its primary. “Everything that I’ve been preaching about for five years he just blew away,” Ribble told me on May 16th. “He appealed to the very worst, most base instincts of who we are as a people.”

Ribble said that Trump was a direct threat to the low-tax, free-trade, entitlement-reform agenda that helped Republicans win the House. “What Trump is proposing is an economic disaster,” he said. But his greatest concern was Trump’s character. “Galatians 5 says, ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, meekness, kindness, patience, and self-control’ ”—those are “the things that matter to me,” he said, and in his view Trump didn’t exhibit any of them.

I asked Ribble what advice he had for Paul Ryan, also from Wisconsin, who was the most senior Republican still withholding support for Trump. He reminded me that a few days earlier Ryan had declared that he wanted “a standard-bearer who bears our standards.” Ribble realized that Ryan, as the Speaker of the House and the chairman of the Republican National Convention, was in a difficult situation, but “you need to go back to the core principles that give you your own center in life,” he said. “I just spoke about that verse in the Bible. Paul Ryan holds those same values.”

Two weeks later, on June 2nd, Ryan made his announcement that he would vote for Trump, in an op-ed on the Web site of his home town paper, the Janesville Gazette. He downplayed the policy differences between them, arguing that “we have more common ground than disagreement,” and adopted Price’s theory that Trump could advance the House’s agenda. Close readers of the column pointed out that Ryan never used the word “endorse.” “We’re not playing word games,” his spokesman clarified in a tweet. “Feel free to call it an endorsement.”

Ryan might have hoped that his statement would be overshadowed by a speech that Hillary Clinton delivered that day, condemning, in scathing terms, Trump’s foreign policy. Instead, the news turned to Trump’s comments about Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge overseeing the case about whether Trump University was a fraudulent scheme. Trump repeatedly described the judge as “a Mexican” whose background made him unfit to preside over the case. (Curiel was born in Indiana to Mexican-immigrant parents.) Asked in one interview whether a Muslim judge would be similarly incapable of being fair, Trump said, “That would be possible. Absolutely.” Not only had Ryan won nothing from Trump before endorsing him; now he had to respond to one of the most incendiary comments of the campaign. Trump’s attack on Curiel, Ryan said, was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” He strained to explain that, despite the racism, he was still backing Trump.

At one point, Trump’s candidacy seemed to represent an ideological challenge to the Party. His views on taxes, the size and role of government, immigration, and trade suggested that the Party could offer its struggling middle-class voters more than austere budgets, deregulation, and upper-income tax cuts. Not so long ago, it was popular in Republican circles to talk about “makers” and “takers,” and to note disapprovingly how many Americans—the takers—don’t pay federal income tax. In March, Ryan apologized for using such language. “There was a time that I would talk about a difference between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits,” he said. “But, as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized something. I realized that I was wrong.”

Ryan’s speech was reported as an implicit rebuke to Trump’s campaign rhetoric, but it was also an indication that Ryan was moving closer to Trump, at least on the broad issue of being less hostile to the welfare state. Other ambitious politicians, like Tom Cotton, have turned to the issues that Trump has emphasized. “The people who are truly hurting in today’s economy are working-class Americans,” Cotton said. He told me a story about a woman he met at a factory in Texarkana. “She sure as hell pays the payroll tax, and she pays our state income tax,” he said. “And she pays a property tax on her small home, and she pays excise taxes every time she picks up a pack of beer or a pack of cigarettes, and she pays sales tax every time she goes to buy groceries.”

Cotton has taken some steps in Trump’s direction with the way he talks about immigration and taxes. Ryan, who rose to prominence in the House by forcing his colleagues to support politically perilous cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and assistance to the most vulnerable, has lately tried to highlight anti-poverty solutions and some government programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, that he believes work well. Neither politician is challenging the core elements of the Party’s reigning economic philosophy, but Trump’s popularity could change that. Goldwater alienated as many voters as he attracted, and his opposition to civil-rights legislation turned generations of African-Americans away from the Republican Party. But by 1968 Richard Nixon had figured out how to borrow the more popular aspects of Goldwater’s agenda while shedding his more radical ideas, to win a majority.

Trump’s racist comments may prove ruinous for the Party. Last week, as Republicans scrambled to distance themselves from Trump after his comments on Curiel, I called Senators Flake, Collins, and Cotton again. Flake noted that he had just learned that Senator Mark Kirk, of Illinois, had retracted his endorsement of Trump. “The new Trump looks a lot like the old Trump,” Flake said. “I still hold out hope, I guess, that I can support him, but I don’t think it’s likely.” He pointed out that Trump was about to turn seventy. “It’s tough to change after thirty,” Flake said. “Let alone after seventy.”

Collins told me that Trump’s comment was “an order of magnitude more serious” than anything he’d previously said, including his “troubling insults toward individuals” and “his poorly thought-out policy plan about banning Muslims from entering this country.” She then said that she has not ruled out supporting Hillary Clinton. “I worked very well with Hillary when she was my colleague in the Senate and when she was Secretary of State,” Collins said. “But I do not anticipate voting for her this fall. I’m not going to say never, because this has been such an unpredictable situation, to say the least.”

Collins said that on some issues she continues to agree with Trump. “For example, I do think we’ve had poorly negotiated trade agreements that have hurt manufacturing in this country and have cost thousands of Mainers their jobs,” she added. “On that issue, I think Donald Trump would be a far tougher negotiator than Hillary Clinton would be.”

Cotton still wouldn’t rule out being Trump’s running mate, but he also spoke against Trump’s attack on Curiel. “I certainly thought it was racially biased,” he said. “He shouldn’t make that kind of comment—he should retract it and get back onto the issues.” Cotton’s view was that Trump had a winning message. “He should focus on the issues that actually matter to Americans, like immigration,” he said. “Like the fact that the working class hasn’t had a raise in a very long time, and the fact that Obamacare premium rates are going up in state after state.”

Trump may be incapable of running a disciplined campaign against a Democrat—a campaign that sticks to that message without skidding off into racist diatribes. “If anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it,” Senator Lindsey Graham told the Times last week, referring to Trump’s Curiel remarks. If Trump is defeated, another Republican may prove able to resurrect aspects of his economic populism and his more generous view of the role of government, and combine them with the more inclusive language recommended by the Party establishment. If that happens—if Cotton, Ryan, or another canny young conservative becomes the Nixon to Trump’s Goldwater—then we will remember Trump for reintroducing overt racism into mainstream politics and for imbuing the Republican Party with a new economic populism. ♦

*Christie's office denies this account.