Republicans upset by GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s departures from conservative orthodoxy should blame the George W. Bush legacy, Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley said Wednesday.

Appearing on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” Shirley disputed recent comments by MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough that Trump’s rise marks the end the Reagan legacy.

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“The anger really belongs at the feet of Bush and Bushism and what they did to the party, what the Bushes did tot he party,” he said. “Big-government Republicanism didn’t come into usage yesterday. It came into usage during the first and second administrations of George W. Bush.”

Shirley said Bush presided over the growth of the federal government. He said the Bush brand of conservatism is rooted in the British tradition, which emphasizes the preservation of institutions. The power flows from institutions to the people. Reagan, Shirley said, promoted a uniquely American strain of conservatism in which power flows from the people to institutions.

“It’s up to us to re-educate and rewind and protect Reaganism as an intellectual force in America,” he said.

Trump is riding high after taking three of four states up for grabs on Tuesday. He now has the clearest path to the nomination of any candidate left in the race. He has ascended in part, Shirley said, because of  a succession of useful foils — Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and most recently, Mitt Romney.

“Donald Trump may be the luckiest politician I’ve ever known,” he said. “From the beginning, Trump has had the benefit of defining himself by defining his opponents.”

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The same goes for the array of conservative think tanks that have tried to engage Trump, Shirley said.

“They are, for the most part, linear thinkers,” he said. “They’re not thinking spherically, and that’s the way Trump is running his campaign … Just because they’re in think tanks doesn’t mean they think.”

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That is not to say Trump can’t improve. To transform himself from a successful primary candidate into a legitimate contender for the White House, Shirley said, he needs to start acting presidential.

“The way you’re going to tell if he understands the difference is that he’s going to stop using first-person pronouns and start using plurals,” he said. “He gonna start using ‘we, us and ours’ instead of ‘I, me and mine.’”