In the autumn of 2008, a variety of accomplished experts in American politics published a book that sought to explain how the seemingly impossible had happened and a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois had stolen his party’s presidential nomination from a figure that spent the last eight years being groomed for the role. These authors’ thesis was a simple one: elected and unelected party insiders, not the general electorate, decide who will be their standard-bearer. The Party Decides contended that this has been the case in American elections for decades, and it was only exacerbated by the post-1968 reforms to the primary process that were designed to eliminate the “smoky rooms” in which party elders chose their presidential nominee. This theory of plutocracy may be a republican feature of the American system, but it certainly isn’t a democratic one. And it makes sense that it would be bitterly resented by those who do not count themselves among party elites – particularly those who wield substantial influence over the political debate. Donald Trump is the embodiment of their angst. 

Trump, an erstwhile Democrat who even now holds a slew of doctrinaire liberal positions, makes for a bizarre frontrunner in the race for the GOP nomination. Many have performed noble dissections of the perspective that animates the average right-leaning Trump supporter to back the celebrity candidate. How can conservatives who vigorously oppose the Affordable Care Act support an individual who even recently has defended universal health care systems in Scotland and Canada, they ask. How is it possible for pro-life voters to back a figure that has defended Planned Parenthood’s access to federal subsidies? What compels life-long Christian conservatives to embrace as a role model a man who quite clearly only pretends to have read the Bible, calls the body of Christ in Communion “a little cracker,” and who mocks the physical appearance of his only female opponent, the cancer-surviving Carly Fiorina?

The answers to these questions are not easy, as the Summer of Trump has illustrated. Quite a bit of his appeal is drawn from his willingness to speak that which is on the minds of so many, but which has been deemed by cultural arbiters too gauche and nativist to say outright. What’s more, he legitimizes the views of immigration hawks who want to see work visas curtailed, the Constitution amended, and 11 million illegal residents deported, even if they know full well this is not workable policy but throat-clearing. But polls that show immigration was an issue of limited importance to conservative voters before Trump entered the race suggest that this is not a comprehensive explanation. Much of the celebrity candidate’s appeal might be partially explained, however, by the eagerness of those conservative figures who wield outsize influence over the political dialogue to paper over Trump’s ideological deviations.

Popular conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly cast Trump a victim of a hostile press – a mark of honor Trump shares with virtually every conservative political figure with broad electoral appeal. “They have not seen an embattled public figure stand up for himself, double down and tell everybody to go to hell,” Limbaugh said of Trump after he mocked Senator John McCain for being captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese. “Trump is not following the rules that targets are supposed to follow. Targets are supposed to immediately grovel, apologize.”

“Trump echoes Reagan in some significant ways,” read a post on Laura Ingraham’s Lifezette, which almost daily presents readers with a case for Trump as best-case GOP nominee. The site’s pro-Trump editorial voice is almost certainly the result of a directive. “Trump on fire & the man who disinvited him is feeling the heat,” Ingraham wrote of Erick Erickson’s decision to disinvite Trump from the influential RedState gathering after the candidate accused Megyn Kelly of suffering from menstrual discomfort during the first GOP debate. “I don’t think most GOP voters will cry a river over hedge funders paying same rates as everyone else,” she said after Trump came out in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy. A few enterprising Twitter users noted that she held precisely the opposite position when Barack Obama campaigned for reelection on precisely the same issue.

These two are in good company. On radio and television, Donald Trump has a host of admirers, and he is a near ubiquitous presence on cable and network television. A Media Research Center study revealed that 55 percent of all network news coverage from July 24 to August 6 was devoted to Trump. A staggering 72 percent of network airtime focused on Trump from August 7 to 20. Trump is far more likely to be seen on the three major cable news networks. The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik observed that Trump is as likely to be flattered on some networks as he is to be probed on others, but he’s never far from a camera.

Surely some of this response is driven by a broadcasters’ obligation to generate ratings, but another force may be at work inspiring the campaign of excuse making from which Trump has benefited. There is no doubt that the real estate mogul is not the favorite of GOP party leaders. In places like New Hampshire, his endorsements are limited to fringe notables like a former state legislator convicted of assault or a state representative who believes the 13th Amendment can be used to strip President Barack Obama of his citizenship. Trump’s unique unattractiveness and his outsider status are perhaps what his media defenders find so compelling. Despite their influence, despite their wealth, despite their ability to bend the national dialogue to their will, they remain outsiders in the political process themselves. In that sense, Trump is very much one of them.

“I don’t think that Donald Trump is very likely to win the nomination in part because he’s not really a Republican,” the survey analyst and proprietor of FiveThirtyEight.com Nate Silver told an audience at the 92nd Street Y on Wednesday. “He’s very far to the right on immigration, but he also wants socialized medicine. He wants to tax the rich, right? There’s an alternate reality in which he decided to run as a Democrat instead — he wouldn’t have to change his policy positions all that much.”

But Silver’s most compelling call for calm among anxious members of the GOP’s anti-Trump faction appealed to themes in The Party Decides. “The nomination party isn’t purely democratic, it’s also party’s process to bestow,” he added. “The party has to give you the nomination.

That grating reality is perhaps what is moving so many members of a class of influential conservatives to rebellion. Before the voters decide who a party’s nominee will be, the national and state-level committees decide, the donors decide, the local and federal elected officials whose endorsements carry vast and underappreciated weight decide. Their cumulative influence dramatically outweighs that of those with a microphone infatuated with the ungentle reality television star.

“It is tempting to look at Mr. Trump’s resilience thus far and conclude that he can defy any effort to bring him down,” New York Times reporter Nate Cohn observed. “But the party has not yet played its full hand, or anything like it. So far, Mr. Trump has fended off a few attacks from a disorganized party at a time when voters are paying relatively little attention. That will change.”

Right now, a spectacularly fractured field of candidates and the early calendar date create disincentives for the party elites to unify around one anti-Trump figure. Cohn notes that, when that condition changes, party leaders with vast and experienced campaign apparatuses buttressing their efforts could spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the effort to knock Trump’s image down to size. Should all else fail, Cohn added, a targeted media blitz focused on delegate-heavy, winner-take-all states like California, New Jersey, and New York in the late spring would reassert the party’s primacy.

Because Donald Trump is no conservative, there must be something else to explain why his supporters behind microphones and in front of cameras are so inclined to forgive his heterodoxy. Perhaps it’s not a perfect explanation, but it is a valid one to suggest that some of it is a rebellion of sorts; a rebellion against elites in general, against a capitulatory GOP leadership in the congress, against lawlessness in the White House, but also against a kind of outsider status in general. If nothing else, Trump is testing the proposition that the old rules still apply.