Don't blame Donald Trump.

Republicans of the old school variety have been all over the media these days, alternately shaking their heads and their fists in frustration as they watch Donald Trump trampling the political landscape in their name. But the simple truth is that Trump has followed the GOP playbook to a T. He has pandered to evangelicals and the gun lobby. He has appointed judges that are off the charts – in some cases literally – at the conservative end of the spectrum. He is rolling back the regulatory state. And he has cut taxes. Hugely.

When the New York Times editorial board declared last Sunday that Republicans Have Become the Party of Debt, it was as though they had been out of the country – or perhaps on another planet – for the last thirty-five years. It is a tribute to the power of the Republican brand that a fair share of Republicans – along, apparently, with the Times editorial board – continue to believe that the GOP is the party of balanced budgets, small government and individual liberty. For decades, that brand has been an illusion. 

The Times editorial pointed wistfully to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who lashed out at his Republican colleagues during his brief filibuster of last week's budget deal: “If you were against President Obama’s deficits, and now you’re for the Republican deficits, isn’t that the very definition of hypocrisy?” Of course it is, but so was Paul's own vote in favor of tax cuts that are projected to add $539 billion to the federal deficit over the next two years, nearly double the spending hike in the two-year spending bill that he decried. It is an article of faith with math-challenged conservatives that a deficit produced by reducing revenues is different from one created by increasing spending. To resolve that quandary – and in the eyes of the New York Times, burying once and for all the GOP reputation for fiscal prudence – they have chosen to do both, Paul's flailing hypocrisy notwithstanding. 

On the eve of the financial collapse in 2008, I published this graph of the change in the public debt by presidential administration. I was trying to make the same point back then that the members of the New York Times Editorial Board still find hard to grasp: This is not their parents' Republican Party. As illustrated here, the public debt declined as a percent of GDP under Presidents Nixon, Carter and Clinton, while rising under Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush. The Republican Party's principled commitment to balanced budgets began to crack with Ronald Reagan's embrace of supply side economics. As was evident in Republican rhetoric as they passed last year's tax cuts, under the tutelage of a cabal of charlatans and cranks, the GOP cast aside its long-standing belief that making difficult fiscal choices was an essential responsibility of governing, in favor of the myth of self-funding tax cuts.

It was the electoral self-interest of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, that led the Republican Party to turn its back on its defining principles and embark on the journey that led it into the arms of Donald Trump. Having suffered a razor thin loss in his first presidential bid in 1960, before winning the White House eight years later with a narrow margin in the popular vote, Richard Nixon swore that he would never suffer a near miss again. And thus was born the Southern Strategy. 

Looking across the electoral landscape of the 1960s, Nixon determined to reshape the Republican coalition by bringing Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. In the wake of the civil rights and anti-war movements, and the cultural turmoil of the 1960s, Nixon's strategy targeted the Southern and culturally conservative working-class voters who were estranged from the Democratic Party and had given Alabama Governor George Wallace 13.5% of the vote in the 1968 Presidential Election. Nixon – who had won nearly a third of the black vote in 1960 – anticipated that the GOP could gain a significant advantage in the Electoral College if it essentially traded its historical support among blacks and Northeastern liberals for the Southern white vote that had long constituted the Solid South of the Democratic Party. After winning the White House by barely half a percent in 1968, he was swept to a second term four years later with a 23% edge in the popular vote, and the largest Electoral College landslide by any Republican in history.

When Ronald Reagan ran against a weak Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential race, he might have chosen to return to the GOP roots, but instead doubled down on Nixon's strategy. In his famous states' rights speech at the Nashoba County Fair in Mississippi in the summer of 1980, Reagan adapted George Wallace's famous words, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever, into a pattern of coded racial rhetoric that would become the GOP standard for decades to come. Just a few years after Congressional Republicans voted overwhelmingly to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – in contrast with a sharply divided Democratic Party – Reagan committed the Republican Party to rolling back the U.S. Department of Justice commitment to civil rights by his promise to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them."

Reagan associate Grover Norquist emerged as the architect of the political strategy that would bind historically Democrat Southern and socially conservative working class whites to the GOP for decades to come. The coalition strategy that he laid out in the late 1980s focused on a half dozen single issue voting groups – anti-tax, pro-gun, pro-life, pro-faith, anti-gay marriage, pro-property rights. Norquist's purpose was not to define the principles of the Republican Party, but rather to provide GOP candidates with an electoral roadmap: swear fealty to each of these groups and he guaranteed victory on Election Day. Norquist "center right" strategy did not dictate where any given candidate should stand on other issues – free trade, immigration, death penalty, and the like – it was simply an electoral strategy to build an enduring Republican majority. 

The commitment of the Republican Party to balanced budgets died with George Herbert Walker Bush's support for the 1990 tax increases. When Bush violated his no-tax pledge – in favor of what he imagined to be the higher Republican principle of fiscal rectitude – he doomed both his own re-election and put the final nail in the coffin of that long-standing GOP article of faith. Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge, combined with the ascendency within the party of – in the words of long-time Republican insider Pete Peterson – "an unholy alliance of tax cutting Republicans and big spending Republicans" doomed the fiscal principles that the GOP once stood for. As Grover Norquist observed a few years ago, explaining why a commitment to balanced budgets had no roll in his electoral roadmap, 'the simple the truth is that no one cares about budget deficits except a few old men sipping scotch at the New York Metropolitan Club.' 

For all the hew and cry from disgruntled Never Trump Republicans – and the New York Times editorial board – it is not Donald Trump who undermined the commitment of the Republican Party to what had long been its core principles; it was Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who set the course to where the GOP finds itself today. A half-century ago, Nixon and Reagan lured disgruntled Southern and culturally conservative Democrats into the Republican Party. Over the ensuing decades, as those voters became the base of the GOP, abortion, guns, faith and the myth of self-funding tax cuts – along with coded racial rhetoric that has increasingly seeped into public policy – have become the core commitments of the GOP, effectively replacing the principles that the party once stood for.

It should be no surprise, then, that Donald Trump has succeeded by aping the style and substance of a Southern populist. Far from trampling on what some view as Republican traditions, he has diligently embraced the Norquist electoral playbook that Nixon and Reagan first put in place. If he chose to deepen his appeal by being more Huey Long than Jeb Bush – giving no regard to Republican pieties about balanced budgets, small government or individual self-reliance that have long since been rendered quaint – it is because he understands that the GOP did not take over the Southern Democratic Party, as Richard Nixon imagined, instead, the Southern Democratic Party took over the GOP.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out his political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.