Asking Peter Wehner to explain the state of today's GOP is futile, and The New York Times ought to know it. Wehner can't see it, or else he can't claim his role in it.
Trump is indeed an "apotheosis" of a steady continuum that Wehner and his fellow shills created. The policies they promoted were secondary. Primary for Wehner and the whole GOP information combine was just one idea: there is no such thing as a self-evident irrefutable fact. Reality is a construct of political power and that power derives not from the consent of a responsible electorate, but from voters infantilized and stupefied by propaganda. Wehner helped make that the foundation of the GOP's power today. That's why we have Trump: the Republicans made a voter base that hates the very idea of fact, and rejects people who use it. They can nullify any fact with two words: Fake News.
Years of sowing visceral doubt and skepticism led GOP voters to this tainted water and got them to drink. Fake News is just shorthand for everything Wehner’s GOP did: No WMD in Iraq? Fake News. Climate change? Fake news. Evolution? Fake news. If he admits it, Wehner must look back on his whole career and say that his value was as a clever liar whose sophistry could be mistaken for reason, and that his effect on the GOP was to dumb them down gradually so they could be managed.
Now the Republicans have lost control. Before Trump the GOP was a party of dissolution and dehumanization, of resentment and enmity, of half-truths and anti-truths. Trump just did all that candidly. Trump saw that the GOP electorate was so debased that little lies didn't satisfy people anymore, and that faking reason wasn't necessary. Weak, terrified, and stupefied after decades, the mob that Wehner and the rest of the Right's erudite liars cultivated for years was there for the taking by someone shameless, opportunistic, and vulgar enough to feed all that. Trump took it.
The Times isn’t alone here but of all the once-respected media, their leadership is indispensable to setting the Right back on course. They have to be part of the solution to the collapse of Conservatism, but they are too parochial and lazy to look for it beyond their closed circle. The Gray Lady’s feeble irrelevance in this culture war is impermissible.