Trump is "normal"

That is to say, the Trump phenomenon our friends in the professional political establishment prefer to view as some sort of aberration is actually nothing of the sort. Instead it's just the latest waypoint in a long running American trudge to the far right that shows no signs of slowing.

Several leaders of key activist groups held a news conference Wednesday to denounce Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his leadership team, accusing them of ignoring grass-roots conservatives and hitting them for the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare.

“This pattern of failure from McConnell’s gang of five leadership team while loathing and attacking their own base, the most loyal bloc of voters that has elected them and all of their caucus members, can no longer be tolerated,” said Ken Cuccinelli, president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has supported conservative challengers take on GOP incumbents.

There is always room on the right to outflank even the most reactionary Republicans. The signatories to this attack on McConnell know. They've only been at this forever. 

First there’s Richard Viguerie, basically the inventor of right wing direct mail fundraising. In many ways Viguerie invented clickbait and fake news decades before the Internet. He’s 84.

Then there’s Brent Bozell. Bozell has lived his entire life in the sinecure right wing activism world, which some very unnice people are ungenerous enough to call the world of ‘wingnut welfare’. He founded the Media Research Center in 1987 – full-time yakking about ‘liberal media bias’. His father was L. Brent Bozell, Jr., partner with Bill Buckley is launching much of what we know as movement conservatism today. Among many other things he ghosted Barry Goldwater’s ‘Conscience of a Conservative’, a bible of young conservatives in the early 60s which helped launch his 1964 presidential run.

To the extent that Trump is something ‘new’ in the GOP firmament, these folks are as old as it gets. The other three all predate Trump and in key cases predate the Tea Party. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots is the ‘newest’ person on the list.

It's a little weird that Marshall goes on almost to discount the significance of this even as he recognizes it. 

There’s no new anything. Trump is the candidate of the most unreconstructed elements of movement conservatism. In many ways, the folks modern conservatives don’t want to associate with publicly anymore.

Not sure what he means by "modern conservatives."  If he thinks they're anything apart from the movement that spent the last several decades getting us to Trump, he's wrong about that. Also I would argue there's nothing to stop them continuing on in this direction indefinitely.