Nearly eight months into Donald Trump’s second term, many in the mainstream media and political class are still clinging to an outdated understanding of Trumpism and the country’s collapse into competitive authoritarianism. To them, even after eight years of experience, the president is some type of sui generis figure, an aberration in American politics and culture. They continue to desperately search for “principled conservatives,” those “adults in the room” who “believe in the institutions” to stop him.

These hopes for a hero are empty and misplaced. In reality, Trump and his MAGA movement did not take over the Republican Party and the right-wing. Their marriage was not forced. He simply gave today’s Republicans and conservatives enthusiastic permission to be their true selves and to drop the mask.

To understand the deeper history behind this moment and how we got here, I recently spoke with historian Allan J. Lichtman, whose latest book “Conservative at the Core: A New History of American Conservatism” will be released on Sept. 1. The author of fourteen books and writing that has appeared in leading outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, he serves as distinguished professor of history at American University. But Lichtman is perhaps best known for his 13 Keys prediction system, which has successfully forecast the results of 10 of 11 presidential elections since 1984.

In this conversation, Lichtman details how Trump and the ascendance of American authoritarianism represent the end goal of American conservatism’s last 100 years — and warns that there is no quick fix that will resolve our democracy’s current crisis.

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