I bet a lot of trumps base considers themselfs conservative but look away from basically every inner political move trump made.
This is what confuses me about the "conservative core" your are speaking of. Where is it?
They (and a lot of democratic voters!) were always skeptical of things like very-liberal trade policy. The gap between that long-running strain in the voters, and what the bipartisan neoliberal consensus on trade (and immigration, for all Republican politicians complained about it when campaigning) had looked like among nearly all Federal elected officials from the early '80s on, is exactly the kind of thing that Trump exploited to swiftly take over the entire party.