Trump’s elephant

When Reagan was elected four years later his party was balanced on three legs. Economic conservatives wanted government to spend less and tax less; social conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, wanted the government to ban more and permit less; and national-security hawks wanted the government to wield enormous power overseas. This coalition ran the gamut from the libertarian to the deeply illiberal, but its factions had enough in common for the top brass to keep things moving along. The economic conservatives and national-security hawks, all well represented among party activists, elected officials and big donors, were allowed to run things, so long as they paid sufficient regard to the social conservatives. Part of the deal was they would not actually carry out their oft-stated aim to reduce government spending radically: more popular in theory than in practice. Tax cuts, on the other hand, were fine with all but the most dour deficit hawks—the more the merrier.

But within this odd, successful alliance there was already a significant constituency that wanted just what Mr Trump would later offer. Pat Buchanan, a speechwriter for Nixon, ran in the 1992 and 1996 primaries on a platform of opposition to immigration, free trade, gay rights and multiculturalism. The second time round he won four states and about a third as many votes as the winner, Bob Dole.

In the early 2000s, with America attacked by terrorists and mounting foreign invasions, many of these people rallied to the president: internal dissent in the party turned to the matter of taxes—the key issue, early on, for the activists known as the Tea Party. The culturally populist position re-emerged in 2008, when the party no longer needed to support a sitting president and some became smitten with the vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, an Alaskan governor who compensated for not knowing things by making Republican voters feel feisty.

This form of Republicanism attracted a number of former Democrats. John Sides of George Washington University says this migration of working-class whites to the Republicans “mainly occurred from 2009 to 2015. It was not a consequence of the 2016 campaign” (see chart 2). Mr Bartels concurs: “I find remarkably little change in partisanship between 2015, when Trump was first emerging as a national political figure, and late 2017,” he wrote recently. Many of Mr Trump’s supporters joined the party before he did so himself.

Mrs Palin was the harbinger in 2008. In 2012 it was Herman Cain, a black fast-food restaurateur, lobbyist and Tea Partier who had never held elected office and wished to cut the income-tax rate to 9%. He was leading the Republican field when he was accused of sexual harassment by several women—something which, in those innocent days, was enough to sink a candidacy.

Mr Cain was not the only recipient of the base’s wayward affections: it was clearly reluctant to settle down with Mr Romney. In the end it did. But his campaign showed that the party was changing. After Mr Ryan, his vice-presidential candidate, talked like a regular fiscal conservative about tackling the deficit with cuts to social security and Medicare, the campaign whisked him into a witness protection programme. Never again was he allowed to trouble elderly Republican voters who wanted to keep the government’s hands off their Medicare. Spending cuts were not for the party faithful: they were for other, less worthy people—a position that helpfully allied prejudice to prudence.

Vice-presidential candidates could then still be controlled by party machinery. Non-candidates could not be. Fox News, which came to dominate cable news in the 2000s, happily provided a platform for populist conservative politicians, including Mr Buchanan, Mrs Palin, Mr Cain and many more, as well as for popular, partisan and peculiar hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. It both articulated and enforced a new and often increasingly extreme post-Tea Party orthodoxy to which party higher-ups had to pay heed.

Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign might, in other circumstances, have fallen foul of this—not least because he was clear about wanting to keep spending on Medicare and social security. But Fox is an entertainment channel built on righteous indignation as well as a political operation, and in Mr Trump it faced for the first time a politician whose star power outgunned it. The prime-time audience for Fox News is around 2.4m. In its pomp “The Apprentice”, Mr Trump’s reality show, was sometimes watched by ten times that many. The disparity allowed Mr Trump to dictate terms like the star he is. When Megyn Kelly, a Fox News anchor, asked Mr Trump some mildly prosecutorial questions while moderating a primary debate, Mr Trump threatened to boycott the network. Ms Kelly was not removed, but Fox came firmly on to team Trump