House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Sen. John McCain are happy. They have now become useful idiots in President Obama’s latest Trump-bashing performance.

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Republican office-holders have got to stop running to the microphones to denounce Trump every time the press tells them to do so.

If the Republicans want to survive, they better learn to fight the Democrats — and stop fighting their own base.

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The whole notion that they can somehow distance themselves from Trump at this point is simply insane. He is the nominee of their party, and almost everyone in the party has endorsed him. If he goes down in a landslide, they will be wiped out in Congress.

The staff on the front lines of electing Republicans know this.

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“You have to have a successful top of the ticket to do well down-ticket,” Republican National Committee Communications Director Sean Spicer said Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

But even worse than a November route, Republicans hoping to have it both ways will all still be tainted with his defeat. For the next 30 years, every Democrat will refer to the GOP as the party of Trump. It is too late to change these facts now.

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Every time Republicans try to distance themselves from Trump, Obama and the press are going to raise the stakes, as President Obama did on Tuesday by calling Trump “unfit” for office, urging Republicans to pull their support of their own nominee.

“The question I think they have to ask themselves is: If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?” Obama said. “This is daily and weekly where they are distancing themselves from statements he is making. There has to be a point at which you say — this isn’t somebody I can support to be president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party. The fact that this has not happened makes these denunciations ring hollow.”

Obama, Clinton, and the media are not going to let people like Paul Ryan be wishy-washy on Trump. They are going to say, over and over: “If you don’t like him, then how can you support him for president?” And they will keep doing this every time Ryan and others criticize Trump.

If the GOP turns on itself and its base at this point, it will do untold damage to itself for years to come. There won’t be any more small-government conservatism. There won’t be any more social conservatism. There won’t be any more muscular foreign policy conservatism. There won’t be any conservatism, period. We will be a liberal country. There will be no escape — any states that try to pass conservative legislation will soon find that their laws have been struck down by Hillary’s judges.

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People like Ryan and the folks at The Weekly Standard and National Review need to wake up and see what is happening. The Clintons, the Obamas, and the press aren’t interested in preserving some type of “healthy” conservatism that can engage in honest debates with liberals once Trump is gone. They want to destroy conservatism altogether. They think all conservatives are basically evil, including the “nice” ones who live inside the Beltway. They want to make all Americans — all Americans — live under the principles of liberalism. No exceptions allowed — even for “conservatives” who claim that they never liked Trump anyway.

If the Republicans want to survive, they better learn to fight the Democrats — and stop fighting their own base. This election is still very close, and it should be extremely competitive all the way — unless the Republicans decide to spend the next three months attacking each other. Given the Democrats’ disastrous record — on the economy, on trade, on terrorism, on foreign policy — they have no business being returned to office. Trump can win. Republicans can win. But they have to work together.

For years, working-class Americans have donated time, money, and effort to helping the Republicans. They have given the Republicans the House, the Senate, and many governors’ mansions. Now is the time for Republicans to give something back. Stop all the whining and complaining about Trump, and stop letting the Left run all over you.

Start swinging — and not at the man who won your party’s nomination — at Hillary and her gang of radicals.