When news broke that Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and president of the Heritage Foundation, was being removed from his role at the prominent conservative think tank, activists and political insiders wondered: Had the Founding Father of the Tea Party finally been defeated by his longtime foes in the GOP establishment? “If Heritage pushes Jim DeMint out, it was because a few board members, who are close to the Republican establishment, never wanted him to be president and have been working to push him out ever since,” one operative who had worked with Heritage told Politico, which broke the news of DeMint’s imminent departure on April 28.

The speculation made a certain amount of sense: This was Jim DeMint, after all, the man who had clashed with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and bucked the GOP establishment in order to help elect conservatives Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Ben Sasse to the Senate.