hopefully we can put up a candidate that has a conservative platform, some integrity, and values that won't have us becoming a cog in the globalist Progressive world.
lol
Trump has burned the Republican party to the ground.
He's destroyed its chances with minorities for a generation; wrecked pretty much any argument on the basis of character; and ruined the role of policy in the primary selection process.
Minorities are growing in population and political power with every passing year. He is very likely lose the Hispanic vote by a historically low margin, and has hung the millstone of nativism around the Republican party for years to come. His idea of appeal to blacks is to suggest that their lives are hellish, and they have nothing to lose by voting for a President who shows no signs of caring about that community. He isn't doing so hot with Asians either, another growing and influential group.
It should be obvious that Republicans can no longer claim the moral high ground in terms of character. In their willingness to excuse his unethical behavior in the name of political expediency, they have lost that argument for years to come.
Trump's candidacy basically flushed conservative policy orthodoxy down the tubes. Free trade, once a standard position in most conservative ideologies, is now radioactive for Republicans. He's trashed the Club for Growth. I'm not sure what else we can say, because he's flipped on pretty much every policy not only in the past 10 years, but apparently in the last 6 months.
More importantly, he didn't win the primary because of specific policies about taxes, law enforcement, energy policy, foreign affairs, military, veterans, or pretty much anything else -- because he never specified any of that during the primary, and has flipped on them whenever he felt like it. The only specifics, which actually wasn't specific at all, was "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it." He even tried to roll back the extreme nativism, only to find it outraged his alt-right followers.
Trump's candidacy was all about the cult of personality. Not policy.
The reality is that a vulgar, feckless, lying, nativist narcissistic, with a long history history of donating to Democrats, handily beat a dozen Republican candidates in the primary.
Good luck rebounding from that. I have a feeling it's gonna take more than 4 years.