In May 2022, Nancy Pelosi told a gathering at the Aspen Ideas Climate Conference in Miami that she hoped true conservatives would liberate the Republican Party from the clutches of Donald Trump and the faction around him. “Rather than saying, ‘Well, we have to defeat them,’” Pelosi declared, “no, let’s just try to persuade them . . . I want the Republican Party to take back the party, take it back to where you were when you cared about a woman’s right to choose, you cared about the environment.” Pelosi herself has made similar comments a number of times, issuing yet another plea for Republicans to “take back their party” as recently as last month.

Putting aside the obvious issues with the first statement — the consensus within the GOP was neither green nor pro-choice prior to Donald Trump — the sentiment remains emblematic of a kind of thinking that has been prevalent in elite liberal circles since 2016. The Republican Party, we are endlessly told, has been taken over by a narrow cult (or “fringe element” in Pelosi’s words) that has corrupted and debased the noble spirit of American conservatism. Once that element has been defeated, it is typically implied, the Republican Party will resume its historic role as an honest and honorable interlocutor of the country’s progressives and liberals.

Much in this story has never really made sense. In their revulsion toward Trump, too many liberals have invested themselves in an idealized version of pre-2016 Republicanism that has never really existed. Since his hostile takeover of the party, meanwhile, Trump has remained resoundingly popular with actual Republican voters and rarely faced serious resistance from GOP lawmakers during his term as president. Both these facts are evident in the current primary polling, which has continued to show Trump so far ahead of his rivals that the race’s outcome is basically a foregone conclusion.