Former President Donald Trump devoured and remade the Republican Party in his image on Feb. 13, 2016. Standing onstage at a Republican presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, days before the primary, Trump turned to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and calmly slaughtered the remaining sacred cows of the pre-Trump GOP.
“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump said. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. We don’t even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. … We should have never been in Iraq. We destabilized the Middle East. … They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”
The moment was a crossing of the Rubicon for a Republican Party that had long been defined by its commitment to a…
