Long before Donald Trump descended his New York escalator in 2015 to throw his hat in the presidential ring, a Coloradan of prominence did much to lay the groundwork and pave the way.

For recent arrivals to our state, the name Tom Tancredo might not mean much or even be recognizable. However, for those of us with longer-term Colorado roots, Tancredo was a perennial political presence, often a provocateur and in this case a trailblazer.

Flash back to the late 1970s and Tancredo, then a state representative from Arvada, was a charter member of the “House Crazies,” a brand assigned to a handful of Republican legislators who were further to the right than was then the norm and more willing to throw sand into the governmental wheels.

This group was a precursor to Newt Gingrich and his minions well before they rose to congressional power over a decade later. And they preceded the Tea Party by a full three decades.

I was then a young staffer to Gov. Dick Lamm. Suffice to say that Tancredo was a nemesis and the feeling was surely mutual.

But times change. In the years that followed, we would occasionally share a Friday night TV panel. While we disagreed more than not, I gained an appreciation for Tancredo’s sense of humor and his certain impish delight in mischief.

We then found an issue on which we were in synch and one that fueled my departure from the origins of the Democratic Party of my youth. That issue was broad-based school choice. Tancredo was a champion of the cause and boosted it at every opportunity as regional director of the Department of Education (yes, that bugaboo) under Ronald Reagan.

At the end of the 1990s, Tancredo won a five-way GOP primary election with less than 26 percent of the vote. That was good for a ten-year ticket to Congress from the Denver suburbs.

On Capitol Hill, Tancredo found his passion project and definitional issue, that being a severe, uncompromising crackdown on illegal immigration. He rode the issue and he rode it hard. His congressional stint coincided with George W. Bush’s presidency. While both Republicans, their manner and their approach to this particular issue could not have been further apart.

Tancredo and Karl Rove, Bush’s senior advisor, engaged in a public feud. At one point, Rove warned Tancredo to, “never darken the doorstep of the White House.”

It was all a preview to the rift that would cleave the Republican Party until Trump ended it by winning the nomination and the Oval Office in 2016, first vanquishing Bush’s younger brother, Jeb, among a slew of others.

History will note that Tancredo and his allies won the battle for his party’s heart and soul to go along with that of much of the nation at-large.

At the end of his congressional tenure, Tancredo entered the Republican presidential field in 2008 as a one-note, anti-immigration candidate. His campaign did not gain all that much traction, but the issue did.

Clearly, Tancredo lacked Trump’s celebrity and media savvy on top of other intangibles. But his obsession with immigration, and his naked hostility to newcomers, legal and especially illegal, echo years later through Trump’s MAGA movement.

Whether it was the intra-party battles or the time in the Washington limelight or the coarsening of political culture or simply the impacts of age, Tancredo returned to Colorado a hardened person. He had his issue and he would abide no dissenting viewpoint, particularly within GOP ranks.

In a conversation not that long after Barack Obama’s first election, Tancredo offered his view that America’s new president was akin to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Whatever your partisan affiliation, it ought to be acknowledged that Obama left office after two terms with Washington hardly resembling Caracas.

Tancredo also came to regard himself as the indispensable person. In 2010, he ran for governor as the candidate of the never-to-be-heard-from-again American Constitution Party after the GOP nomination process went off the rails. He ran again for governor in 2014, this time back as a Republican, but failed to gain the nomination. He flirted with another such race in 2018.

All told, Tancredo’s political career withered even as his signature issue picked up velocity. He is now approaching his 80th birthday and has endured his share of health struggles.

With a president he foreshadowed in the White House and with immigration enforcement ramped way up, his social media shows that he is as all-in and unwavering as ever. The Republican Party is forever changed and the issue he brought to the fore now prevails even as Tancredo finds himself far from the action and the spoils.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for ColoradoPolitics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann.