With the impeachment proceedings of President Trump maturing and impeachment on the horizon, Ronald Reagan and his legacy are more important to the American Right now than they have been in a generation.

As a Reagan scholar who has spent weeks at the Reagan Library and Museum, and written a book on the Reagan legacy, I was pleased that the complex survived the recent fires. As the flames engulfed the California landscape, threatening to destroy the physical manifestation of the Reagan legacy, it seemed a sad yet fitting image for the state of the modern American conservative movement and Republican Party. Trump threatens to dismantle the policy platform that Republicans have embraced since 1980.