BREAKING! MUST CREDIT THOMAS EDSALL! TRUMPISM ENDURES!

In The New York Times, Thomas Edsall has some astonishing news for us:

No! Really? You think?

Edsall has put together the right-wing-pundit equivalent of one of those "In this Ohio diner..." safaris the Times used to enjoy so much until it switched over to focus groups. The first right-winger we hear from is Matthew Continetti, who has some thoughts about why the rise of Donald Trump happened:

In Continetti’s telling, there was deepening frustration and anger on the right after Republicans took control of the House in 2011 but still could not block the seemingly inexorable move to the left. In 2011, the Department of Education declared that Title IX required universities to investigate charges of sexual harassment with few due-process protections for the accused — to the dismay of many conservatives (and plenty of liberals). In 2012, the Department of Health and Human Services mandated that Obamacare cover the costs of contraception and abortifacients. In 2016, the Department of Education advised schools to allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice.

“These administration dictates made many conservatives question the efficacy of controlling Congress,” Continetti writes. “The legislative body seemed unable to prevent the Obama agenda in any fashion.”

Before we consider the question of whether this is actually why Trump won the 2016 GOP primaries, let's think about what Continetti is saying here. He appears to be saying that Republicans believed they should have complete control over the agenda of the federal government even though the public had elected and reelected a Democratic president. I'm sure this is, in fact, what they believed, and what they still believe: that when Democrats control all or part of government, they should not be allowed to enact any part of their own agenda, because control of the government is the GOP's birthright -- after all, it's the party of "normal" Americans.

I'm sure this was a factor in Trump's primary victory, though Continetti ignores Trump's demonization of Mexican immigrants and his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Edsall acknowledges that immigration was Trump's main issue, and he brings on Charles Murray to describe an elitist GOP ripe for Trumpism. (Fox News and its incessant, rabble-rousing demonization of liberals and Democrats are never mentioned.)

Edsall's correspondents insist that the toothpaste can be put back in the tube.

Most of those I contacted voiced considerable optimism that everyone on the first tier of prospective Republican candidates to replace Trump as the 2024 nominee, should such a development come to pass, could restore the Republican Party’s viability in presidential elections, especially in the suburbs.

“For me,” wrote Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review, “the obvious path ahead is national candidates — say, a Ron DeSantis, Tom Cotton or Glenn Youngkin — who learn the positive lessons from Trump, reject the negative, and, free of all his baggage, forge a new political and substantive synthesis that is appealing to the Trump base and the suburbs.”

A word of explanation: Hating immigants is not part of "the negative," in Lowry's view. He says:

We won’t see a so-called comprehensive immigration reform again for a long time — and good riddance.

And:

In addition, Lowry noted, “any impetus to pursue entitlement reform has completely disappeared.”

That would be news to Senator Rick Scott, whose 11-point program for Republicans includes a call to sunset every federal law after five years, among which would be the laws that created Social Security and Medicare. The program also includes this demand:

Force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt.

Note that Scott says "when," not "if." There's no question that he and his allies are ready to declare these programs unsustainable and begin the process of gutting them, if at all possible.

Edsall worries about Trump's anti-democratic authoritarianism and personality defects. He asks,

Would a Youngkin or DeSantis or Cotton presidency in 2025 or 2029 be a conservative corrective to Trump, or would any of these three possibilities simply give a patina of legitimacy to Trump’s flagrantly aberrant moral compass?

Edsall arrives at the right answer in the wrong way:

The primal forces unleased by Trump have not lost momentum. Whoever ends up as the Republican Party nominee in 2024 — whether it is Trump himself or one of the other contenders — will be under pressure to continue the abandonment of principle. Among the others, there might be less lying and less overt narcissism, but any one of them could yet govern in the mold of Trump.

"Under pressure"! Yes, I'm sure Ron DeSantis and Tom Cotton are embracing a strongman approach to politics because they feel forced to do so, not because they're perfectly fine with such an approach.

Let's go back to where we started: Matthew Continetti's complaint that Republicans couldn't get everything they wanted from government because of the silly technicality that the other party's candidate had won two straight presidential elections. Republicans haven't believed in democracy for years, if democracy is defined in America as the belief that Democrats are permitted to govern when they're legitimately elected. Republicans are still the stand-athwart-history-saying-no party on climate change and guns; they still hate diversity and pluralism of belief, and they're still the most reliable defenders of persistent economic inequality. Republicans have retained all the terrible attributes of the pre-Trump GOP and eagerly embraced all the terrible attributes of Trumpism; they'll be both kinds of Republican for the foreseeable future, quite eagerly.