In recent years, there has been a significant political realignment. The Democrats used to be the party of government and Republicans the party of business. Now Democrats are the party of the system, and Republicans, under Trump, represent those outside the system.

There are other important differences. Democrats are the party of the cities, while Republicans are the party of the suburbs and rural America. Democrats are the party of the military-industrial complex and Republicans are becoming, though not fully committed, to being the party of peace and strategic disengagement. Democrats represent both economic extremes; they are the party of the credentialed professional classes and also of the institutionally dependent poor. Republicans are the party of those who work in the private sector—some rich, some poor—but all in a much more precarious situation than those inside the system.

Trump’s victory in 2016 does not get enough credit for being a success in what was effectively a two-front war. Before defeating Hillary Clinton, he defeated multiple Republican candidates in the primary who looked good on paper and represented typical post-Cold War Republican orthodoxy.

George W. Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Ted Cruz were formidable contenders, each well-financed and representing different factions of Republican support. They were united against Trump, even as they campaigned against one another. Trump beat them, and it was an enormous surprise.

He later beat Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate par excellence: wife of a president, former secretary of state and U.S. senator, Yale-educated, and seething with resentment that anyone would again dare to block her from “her turn.”

Trump’s win against Hillary was an enormous “no confidence” vote in the system, even more profound than his victory in the Republican primary, where a divided field worked to Trump’s advantage. The general election showed that Trump’s brand of populism sold better than the pro-corporate, anti-labor, interventionist, open borders, anti-tariff, and puritanically-flavored culture war positions of Republican orthodoxy. Trump was different; he was anti-immigration, pro-tariff, and anti-interventionist when all three positions were anathema to Republican officials, even while being popular with Republican and independent voters.

Hillary overestimated her appeal as a continuity candidate after eight years of Obama’s rule promising “hope and change.” In spite of being a change candidate, his brand of governance was very wedded to the establishment and led to the rise of Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. Hillary and the party crushed their outsider challengers in the primaries, unlike the Republicans.

To the extent Hillary thought about the reasons voters might be rejecting the establishment, she was puzzled. In her eyes, the system was doing a great job, so her explanation mostly devolved into ad hominems, such as the infamous “basket of deplorables” comment. Even so, claims that Trump would be too harsh to illegal immigrants or insufficiently solicitous of NATO fell on deaf ears.

Trump, like other outsiders, criticized politics prior to his arrival by suggesting there was no significant difference between the two parties. He argued persuasively that both parties set narrow boundaries to the national political discussion and maintained a significant consensus on issues that mattered.

Both supported globalism and free trade, open borders, and an ongoing, muscular foreign policy that aimed to keep America as the sole superpower. Both parties were very much influenced by large donations from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and related industries like law and consulting that were close to managerial class power in Washington, D.C.

This is why the recent news that former Bush White House officials—including former vice president Dick Cheney, his daughter and former congressman, Liz Cheney, and former Bush-era attorney general, Alberto Gonzales—have endorsed Kamala Harris is not terribly surprising and will not move anyone. This brand of conservatism, the ossified Reagan worship of the second Bush administration, lost its luster as the national unity following the 9/11 attacks became dissipated in corporate giveaways, amnesty proposals, a never-ending war in Iraq, and the deep and prolonged 2008 economic crisis that started during Bush’s second term. When Obama came along, the election was a referendum on the Bush presidency and its policies, and voters rejected both in 2008 and 2012.

Only during Obama’s second term in office did it become clear that he had done nothing to reign in corporate power, was as enthralled by foreign interventions as his predecessors (such as Libya and Syria), and kept the Afghanistan war pointlessly puttering along. He did withdraw our forces from Iraq, only to reintroduce troops when ISIS appeared, a direct consequence of America’s destabilization of neighboring Syria.

Facing Trump in 2016, Hillary said she would continue Obama’s approach, and voters soundly rejected her appeal. It turns out the steady decline of wages and wealth, economic uncertainty, increasingly politicized racial conflict, forever wars overseas, and the violence, ugliness, and coarseness of everyday life all added up to widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.

No one on the Republican side is now impressed by Bush-era throwbacks, just as Republican deference to the military is at an all-time low. Most recognize in things that mattered, that there was a great deal of continuity between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, which was restored with the election of Joe Biden.

It turns out that the seemingly partisan national elections really are just a question of which personnel take the senior roles, as well as very subtle and symbolic differences on social issues. None of it really mattered to people’s everyday lives or for changes to public policy; the same types of people were running things in the same way.

Further, the ongoing disloyalty and hostility of the Republican establishment toward Trump has not gone unnoticed. They all demanded in 2016 that Trump pledge to support the nominee, only to back off when Trump surprisingly won. Then, in his first term—when Republicans dominated the Senate, House of Representatives, and Presidency—speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, finked on providing funding for the border wall, Trump’s signature promise. Ryan did, however, in old-school Republican fashion, secure tax breaks for the wealthy and connected.

My expectation is that these endorsements will do nothing or slightly backfire. They may function as boomerangs because they remind voters that Trump is beset by enemies on both sides of the political spectrum and that his only real constituency is made up of regular people, shut off from power, who are collectively sick of the nonsense.

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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.