This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 23 episode of “Morning Joe.”

More than a dozen staff members at the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank, are leaving the embattled organization to join Advancing American Freedom, a nonprofit founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.

The staffers’ exodus follows a wave of resignations earlier this month, after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended a friendly interview between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has praised Adolf Hitler.

This is a humiliating loss for Roberts. It’s also a very interesting coup for Pence, whom I think a lot of people had written off and just assumed would be irrelevant. Now he has a conservative think tank in exile.

But this has been a long time coming, hasn’t it? You can trace the evolution of conservatism in the United States by looking at what has happened to the Heritage Foundation in the last few decades.

Back in the 1980s, the organization was the beating heart and intellectual center of the conservative movement. It helped define the “Reagan revolution” and influenced Republican politics at every level.

But in recent years, that has changed.

One of the biggest transformations that Donald Trump and MAGA have inflicted upon the conservative movement is that it’s no longer about principles or ideas; it’s about a cult of personality and serving one man’s personal impulses. The Heritage Foundation followed that path, abandoning core conservative values to align itself with Trumpism.

Seeing this many influential people leave, however, does feel like an indication that a fight to define the future of the conservative movement could be on the horizon. It appears as if we are going to have the kind of debate that, in effect, has been shut down during the Trump years.

Allison Detzel contributed.

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