Donald Trump, a Nazi Brownshirt who sells condos, once broke the bank at a casino. Unfortunately, it was his own.

At the time of Mitt Romney’s 2012 drubbing, I wrote I that didn’t think the GOP would be chastened by the crushing swing-state trashing. The party wasn’t going to start cooperating in D.C. because there were too many entrenched interests demanding dissent as the default mode. Yes, maybe the Republicans would quickly strike a bargain on an immigration bill for strategic purposes (didn’t happen!), but things weren’t go to improve much.

I couldn’t have imagined, however, the 2016 GOP campaign would turn out to be the ugliest thing imaginable, an unhalting parade of bleeding women, rabid dogs and Muslim databases. The pushing of the line to the extreme right will probably ultimately benefit someone like Ted Cruz, who seems mild compared to Trump and Ben Carson, though he’s truly a radical extremist.

In a Politico piece, Jacob Heilbrunn examines how the GOP not only failed to become more inclusive but actually pulled further inside its dark, cold shell. Oh, they’ve built a well, alright! The opening:

How has the party departed so far from the vision Priebus laid out just two years ago?

There are two factors at work. The first is that as the GOP embraces the theme of America’s precipitous decline under President Barack Obama, it’s jettisoning the crusading and optimistic foreign policy credo of George W. Bush. After over a decade of warfare in the Middle East, the notion that Washington can single-handedly transform Muslim societies in America’s image attracts derisory snorts on the right as well as the left. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, by contrast, is harkening back to the Bush legacy by endorsing a federal agency to disseminate “Judeo-Christian values” to Iran Russia, China and the Middle East—“We need to beam messages around the world” Kasich told NBC News. America “means freedom, it means opportunity, it means respect for women, it means freedom to gather, it means so many things.” But many conservatives—both candidates and their constituents—are adopting a darker view of the Middle East, which is that it is irredeemable and thus poses a dire threat to the very existence of western civilization.

The second reason goes back to the end of the Cold War. During the past century, the GOP focused on the internal subversive threat of communism and often depicted liberals as traitors. Now many on the right have seamlessly moved on to hunt for Muslim traitors as part of a third World War against a foreign enemy. They’ve been identifying domestic traitors and declaring a broader war against Islam for years, but have been, for the most part, speaking to deaf ears. To his credit George W. Bush, as has been widely recalled, refused to demonize Muslims after 9/11 and visited a mosque to declare that America was not at war with Islam itself. Now after Paris, the radical right is grabbing the opportunity to push their case to a wider audience.•