Trump's greatest achievement, one that speaks far more than his actual record in office to his business acumen, was recognizing that in the 2012 presidential election, the old movement vein had been exhausted and that a much richer one was awaiting exploration. But what its destruction means is something very different from the prophecies of permanent Democratic supermajorities issuing forth from the former president's critics. Like many observers, including an enormous number of the president's loudest detractors, I believe that Trump brought the conservative movement to an end. What the movement offered the party instead was a kind of geological survey: a map of the sedimentary layers in American political life, and the potential riches waiting to be unearthed by skillful miners of right-wing public opinion. Despite what some have argued, the movement and its institutions have never been synonymous with the Republican Party, which tacitly made its peace with the New Deal when the oldest living Americans were children.
A more interesting question is what effect Trump had upon the so-called "conservative movement," that somewhat more nebulous entity, with its magazines, its think tanks and conferences, its canons of half-understood books, its pantheons of gods and heroes.
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