I’m so old that I can remember when moderate Republicans such as Colin Powell, former secretary of state, clung to hopes that Donald Trump might “grow” into the presidency.

I don’t hear much talk like that nowadays with Trump leading the polls for the Republican nomination again and his remaining opponent Nikki Haley not expected to win even the primary this coming Saturday in her home state of South Carolina.

Here we go again. Ever since Trump surged into the lead in the 2016 primaries, his iron grip has grown tighter around the GOP, pushing it further to the right, even as it also has led to Democratic victories in congressional swing districts.

Latest case in point: Tom Suozzi easily wrested New York’s 3rd District from the GOP in a special election last Tuesday to replace scandalized Republican congressman George Santos.

Still, as much as supporters of moderate alternatives to Trump have rallied to Haley’s side and continue to donate to her campaign, Trump has maintained a polling lead so formidable that the race to the nomination appears to be all over except for the actual voting. In South Carolina, Trump had a 36-point lead over Haley in a recent poll.

That brings a cloud of gloom over what’s left of the “Never Trump” movement, the band of former Republican operatives in groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Accountability Project, who have been working since Trump’s 2020 election defeat to prevent his return to the White House.

If there’s one thing Never Trumpers have proven, it’s that they’ve never come close to loosening Trump’s hold on the Republican base.

“It’s now clear to me that we never had a chance,” my column-writing colleague David French recently wrote in The New York Times. “And the reason is equally clear: We did not truly understand our own party.”

French’s confession was that it dawned on him only gradually that animosity — not support for core conservative values — was the prime motivator for today’s GOP.

To me, that was a stunning observation, partly because it was so candid in a political world where candor so often is lost in a fog of excuses and sugar-coating.

French shifted to the world of punditry from what he describes as a “conservative Christian law firm” with credentials so solid that he was recruited by conservative editor William Kristol to run against Trump in 2016, but later dropped out.

I was disappointed because, even though he’s more conservative than I am, I share his desire to see both parties offer candidates with his level of thoughtful ideas and concern for such old-fashioned, time-tested qualities as character.

Understandably outraged by what he saw as the scandal-plagued presidency of Bill Clinton, he wanted to see a return to the values promoted by former President Ronald Reagan.

I was gratified by his realization that he and his fellow Republicans did not understand their own party because I so often have said the same about Democrats.

If David French and I have lost touch with what’s going on with the rank and file in our parties, Donald Trump appears to have the keen grasp of a master salesman. He gives the people what they want — or at least what they think they want after he sells it to them.

Barack Obama offered us “the audacity of hope,” as he titled his autobiography. Trump offers us the audacity of a pitchman, with the entertainment value of a traveling medicine show mixed in.

Viewed that way, one begins to understand why he has been able to brush off the indictments and other scandals that would have crippled more conventional campaigners. By recasting his own narrative as that of an earnest advocate for ordinary folks against the rich and politically connected, he bestows a new feeling of importance to his adherents: “When you see them coming after me, you know they’re coming after you.”

Frankly, I think it’s quite a stretch to view his indictments and lawsuits alleging fraud, sexual assault and insurrection, among other charges, as akin to coming after me – or anybody other than him. But, as I said, he’s a heck of a salesman.

And that’s what the current presidential campaign is becoming: a grand drama of dueling versions of reality, with us, the voters, sitting in the jury box, hoping to witness some semblance of justice.

cpage@chicagotribune.com

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