This is exactly what I’ve been saying, Trump especially is the perfect far right candidate in that he allows them to have their cake and eat it too. He’s intentionally disposable, an option for a people who would like to pretend they want to govern without the risk of ever actually having to be responsible for anything. Viewed this way his past liberal positions and inconsistency are a feature, not a bug. They can’t conveniently forget them while he’s running but when he eventually loses they can suddenly disavow him and in a perpetual strategy of denial say the party needs to run a true believer.

But let’s indulge Bartlett’s hypothesis. Say Donald Trump wins the nomination and then loses badly to the Democratic nominee. Conservative Republicans can interpret this loss in two ways. On the one hand, they can say, as Bartlett hopes, that Trump lost because he’s too extreme, too unhinged in his views on immigration and women and practically everything else. On the other hand, they can say that Trump lost because he wasn’t extreme enough, because he didn’t double down on whatever they think conservatism is. You can hear the refrain now: Trump used to be pro-choice. He’s anti-trade. He endorsed single-payer health care. He’s not Christian enough.

The same is true of a Carson loss. Sure, Carson is the latest darling of the conservative movement, but if he loses to Clinton or Sanders, conservatives will suddenly notice that he never really knew what he was talking about. Rather than accept that Carson lost on account of his extreme conservatism, they’ll look for ways to retroactively condemn him as a liberal. They’ll open up just enough space in their information bubble to acknowledge articles like this, which highlight the many liberal things Carson has said and written in the past. Although Carson parroted every conservative dogma you can imagine during this campaign, conservatives are unlikely to connect that to his loss, because that would be an indictment of conservatism as such.