Ben Sasse and Mike Lee have been the paragons of principled, conservative congressional opposition to Donald Trump. Since getting to the Senate, Lee has done more than any other Senate Republican to address the discontents that led to the Trump disaster, and Lee opposed Trump to the very end at the Republican National Convention. Sasse has been unsparing (and clever) in his critiques of Trump

My feeling is that healing will start when the best of the Trump supporters and the Never Trumpers have an honest and self-critical conversation about what has gone wrong over the past 16 years. That means Trump supporters will have to come to grips with the reality that there was more wrong with Trumpism than just one man’s foibles.

Never Trumpers will have to join the discussion by explaining how the GOP of 2000–16 sometimes got it altogether wrong and other times had the wrong priorities. I’ve already started my rethink.

In that spirit, I have a question for Senator Sasse: When you put aside the rise in domestic discretionary spending, earmarks, No Child Left Behind, and the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, what were the two most important policy choices that you think the Bush administration got wrong? *

*You might be asking, “What do you mean putting aside all of those issues? What’s left?” I specifically picked those issues because, by 2008, you could probably have gotten a majority of conservatives to agree that the Bush administration had gotten those choices wrong to a greater or lesser degree. Where do we go from there?