I think you missed my point.

Imagine me, a non-conservative, trying to figure out who qualifies as “conservative.”

I point at Trump and all the horrific things he believes and am told, “He’s not a conservative.” But the entire Republican Party is lined up behind him like ducklings following their mother.

In fact, whenever some supposed conservative does something awful, I hear the shouts of, “He’s not a conservative!”

So, after all the ruling out, who’s actually left? The Venn diagram appears to be very sparsely populated.

As for Nazis, I would point out that real live American Nazis are big fans of Trump. Anyone voting for him has to answer the question of why they agree with the guys with the swastika tattoos. Left-wing crazies like Communists hate Biden and the Democratic Party. Why do the extremists run the GOP?

If you vote Republican in November, you’re in favor of letting countries invade and annex one another — or at least letting Russia have Ukraine. That would have been anathema to the conservatives I knew when I was a kid. Ditto for pulling out of NATO and leaving Europe to deal with the Russians alone.

You’re voting for massive deficits blowing up the budget. (Did you know that since 1980, the budget deficit has gone down almost every year a Democrat has been in the White House and up almost every year a Republican has been? Those crazy tax-and-spend liberals have secretly been better stewards of the economy for nearly a half-century.)

The thing is, I’m not sure you’re seeing your own people with clear eyes. Remember the “Tea Party,” the guys who were supposed to be about fiscal issues without all the culture war stuff? In the end, it turned out they were more socially conservative than the typical GOP member. If you make a list of all the right-leaning Americans who aren’t really just culture warriors in one form or another, are any names left on that list?

So, you can solve my confusion by giving some examples of true conservatives as you see them — but large blocks of them, not just a few here or there.

Somebody the other day tried to sell me on Cheney and Kinsinger as proof that “real” conservatives exist. Sure, and they’re being run out of the GOP. They’re politically irrelevant.

I’m not claiming there are none left, only that there aren’t many. I contend that I can freely equate the right with Trumpism because those are the only ones who matter. Is there any proof that the right isn’t just MAGA plus a rag-tag handful of powerless others?