Conservative groups and Republican donors were supposed to spend millions to take out The Donald before things got out of hand. What happened?

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Donald Trump was supposed to be negotiating a new Celebrity Apprentice contract by now.

For seven months, it has been an article of faith among anti-Trump Republicans that the billionaire's calamitous campaign would eventually melt down on its own before things got too serious — and if it didn’t, they assured themselves, a cash-flush coalition of conservative groups, super PACs, and presidential campaigns would chase him out of the race. Attack ads would blanket the airwaves in Iowa. An army of activists would descend on New Hampshire. Trump would be exposed for the charlatan that he is, and he'd drop out before a single vote was ever cast. But the cavalry never came. Now, 18 days out from the Iowa caucuses, Trump is leading every national poll by 10 points or more — and while single-digit candidates and their backers spend millions to bludgeon each other on TV and radio, they’ve barely lifted a finger to take on the frontrunner.

There are millions of dollars worth of anti-Rubio ads airing right now in IA/NH/SC. Not a dime against Trump. Let that sink in for a moment.

It isn't for a lack of antipathy that Trump's opponents on the right are giving him a free ride. The Republican establishment continues to believe his nomination would spell political apocalypse for their party, while small-government purists remain deeply opposed to many of his less-than-conservative economic proposals. Yet, for a variety of reasons, major Republican donors and well-funded political groups have failed to fund a robust anti-Trump campaign, despite increasingly desperate pleas from some quarters of the GOP. "I've been much more blunt in the past couple of weeks when I talk to these guys," said Rick Wilson, an outspoken Trump critic and political strategist who advises several major Republican donors. "I've said, Look, you guys pay me money to tell you what's going on, and you have to start taking [Trump] seriously. When President Hillary Clinton names her second or third Supreme Court justice, I'm going to call and tell you, 'I told you so.' When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer fucks over your industry, I'm going to call and say, 'I told you so.'" Liz Mair, another Republican strategist who doubles as a Trump-hostile talking head on cable news, expressed frustration that the GOP donor class isn't urgently mobilizing against The Donald. "The Republican Party's strategy with regard to dealing with Trump is basically prayer — and that's it," said Mair, who launched a "guerilla" political group in November aimed at "destroying" the candidate. "I think there's a lot of people in the party who go to bed every night and pray that our long partisan nightmare will be over. But they don't do anything to change the equation." "It's disconcerting, to be honest," Mair added. One reason is that Trump's dominance in the polls has been such a conspicuous fixture of the Republican landscape for so long now that his primary opponents have largely accepted it as an all-but-unalterable part of the 2016 topography. Instead of taking strategic strides to diminish the frontrunner's standing or poach his voters, most are simply looking for ways to turn his presence in the race to their advantage. Jeb Bush and John Kasich are the only two candidates in the GOP field who routinely go out of their way to publicly bash Trump. But their attacks often seem less geared toward doing actual damage to the billionaire's candidacy, and more about appealing to the moderate voters and establishment elites who comprise the core of their support. When Bush calls Trump a "chaos candidate," or when Kasich laments the harsh treatment of protesters at Trump rallies, they are using him as a foil — a reasonable strategy for their own campaigns, perhaps, but one that's unlikely to have much of an effect on their target. What's more, when their super PACs produce choir-preaching ads against Trump, they rarely put any money behind them: Rather than airing in primetime TV where large numbers of primary voters can be reached, the commercials are uploaded to YouTube and embedded in email press releases, where they ping-pong around the political class for a while and then quickly get forgotten. Right to Rise, the super PAC supporting Bush, has been a special subject of scorn among anti-Trump Republicans. Many grumble that Mike Murphy, the veteran operative who runs the lavishly funded organization, has squandered millions of dollars churning out vicious (or, occasionally, silly) attack ads against Marco Rubio — who's competing for a similar swath of the electorate as Jeb — while devoting only a meager portion of their budget to ineffectual swipes at Trump. When, for example, Murphy took to Twitter last week to show off their new digital billboard ads in Iowa, he was met with mockery from many conservatives.



...and everybody's mind was suddenly changed.