Donald Trump’s general election prospects were always limited. But now, with the remarks, revelations, and allegations of the last week, including his contestant-corroborated beauty-pageant dressing-room barge-ins and multiple accusations of groping or forced kissing, which Trump denied on Thursday, he’s in camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle territory.

For the first time in more than a century, we’re observing a major-party presidential nominee being torpedoed by character concerns so powerful that important figures in his own party have deserted him. And watching him respond not just by attacking his opponent but by blasting members of his own party’s establishment.

May you live in interesting times, the old saying goes, and by that standard, Americans have little to complain about this year. Indeed, it’s worth a step back from the daily drama of the campaign to contemplate how extraordinary these times are.

Trump has responded by amping up his apocalyptic, survival-of-the-nation-as-we-know-it rhetoric and doubling down on his democracy-defiling demagoguery by calling for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned. That kind of banana republicanism would be stunning if the nation’s political sensibilities hadn’t already been numbed by previous Trump pronouncements.


Still, though Trump is sending his crowds into Dionysian delirium, level-headed Americans are obviously concluding he’s unfit for the White House. Has that kind of characterological disqualification of a major party nominee ever happened before? To find something even remotely similar, you have to go back to 1884. That year, James Blaine, the “plumed knight” from Maine, secured the Republican nomination despite valid concerns that he had taken a bribe from a railroad company. Then, in the campaign’s final days, Blaine failed to object, perhaps because he hadn’t noticed, when a prominent supporter described the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” The ensuing controversy cost Blaine the election.

The reason character disqualification doesn’t happen often is perfectly understandable: For voters who strongly support a party’s positions, the cause usually matters far more than character. But Trump has become such a liability that a significant share of Republican office-holders won’t endorse him. And unlike predetermined partisans, late-breaking voters are more likely to be moved by character concerns.


Yet despite Trump’s impending fate, his campaign could trigger a lasting split in the Republican Party. In some ways, his candidacy highlights a fault line that’s been growing since the Tea Party movement, with its antigovernment populism and ammonic mix of resentments, bias, and conspiratorialism, rose in reaction to President Obama and his agenda. Rather than confront the noxious elements of that movement, Republicans generally tried to finesse, placate, or pander to the Tea Party types.

And then came Trump. After riding the birther nonsense to the top of the polls, in 2011, he decided against running in 2012. But he was back this cycle, and his promise to build a border wall, deport all illegal immigrants, temporarily ban Muslims, and end trade treaties proved more potent than anything his Republican rivals had to offer.

Trump now rides the tiger — and he has it snarling at the Republican establishment. Attacking House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday, Trump said “there’s a whole sinister deal going on” with the House leader and other Republicans who have distanced themselves from him.

So what happens after election day? Trump himself will obviously be done as a candidate, but some, seeing the primary success of his conservative populism and nativism, will try to pursue the same path, while others will want to revert to GOP form.

It’s easy to see two sharply different wings of the party, one protectionist, nationalist, nativist, with neo-isolationist instincts, the other business, free market, and free trade oriented, and internationalist. It’s hard to see how those sharpened differences are easily reconciled. Which is why, after three straight losses, the Grand Old Party might just break apart.


Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh.