As conservatives watch Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, their reactions often mirror the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. You can find conservatives in each of the five stages. David Brooks proudly proclaimed that he would remain in the denial stage even if Trump raised his hand and took the oath of office next January. Many more conservatives remain in the anger stage. National Review recently collected twenty-two conservative writers to condemn Trump, whom the magazine called “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”Meanwhile, as conservatives shift between the stages, there’s an effort to figure out how things could have gone so wrong. This usually takes the form of blaming Trump’s rise on someone else. For a while, the main villain on the right was Barack Obama, whose failures, it has been argued, gave Trump his opening. You can read pundit versions of this case here, here, here, here, here, and here. But the most prominent member of the blame-Trump-on-Obama faction is undoubtedly Jeb Bush, who made the case recently in an interview with NPR...Read more.
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