Donald Trump’s chaotic campaign has left the Republican elite paralyzed, facing a series of terrible options and having no clue, it seems, what the lesser evil really is. Supporting Trump as the nominee risks tarnishing both the party’s reputation and the personal reputation of the people who sign on with Trump. But severing ties with Trump risks a serious fissure in the party that could handicap conservatives’ political prospects for years to come.

You can see the most dramatic manifestations of the strife Trump is causing in the agony of Republican intellectuals, as they publicly wrestle with their future in the party. Soft as a pincushion, Donald Trump is no athlete, rarely doing anything more strenuous than a leisurely game of golf. Still, he enjoys playing the familiar high-school role of the jock who bullies the nerds, especially in his battles with right-wing intellectuals. “Bill Kristol’s a loser,” Trump said of the Weekly Standard editor in May. “His magazine is failing. ... I don’t think it even survives.” In a rally in November, Trump said about George Will, the venerable conservative columnist famous for his ability to quote abstruse writers, “You know he looks smart because he wears those little glasses. If you take those glasses away from him, he’s a dummy.”

In return, conservative nerds have been incessantly plotting revenge against Trump. Kristol has followed an inside strategy of concocting Never Trump plots within the party, while Will has taken the opposite approach by publicly leaving the Republican Party in protest of Trump’s insufficient conservatism. Yet neither Kristol’s efforts from within, nor Will’s example of voluntary political exile, have slowed down Trump’s takeover of the GOP and his flagrant challenges to traditional conservative orthodoxy on issues like trade and foreign policy.

The core problem is that Trump’s conservative critics have yet to take a full measure of Trump’s popularity among Republicans and what it says about the party. This is even true of The Atlantic’s David Frum, usually the most clear-eyed conservative critic of right-wing folly. As an analyst, Frum has the advantage of being a semi-apostate. He was a right-wing apparatchik for most of his adult life, but started having doubts a decade ago about the party’s inability to provide solutions to the economic needs of the working and middle classes. As such, Frum was long alive to the fissures within the Republican Party that became so visible this year, which has made him a diagnostician of unusual acuteness.

Yet even Frum isn’t willing to think through what the Trumpization of the Republican Party means. In his latest article in The Atlantic, Frum argues that conservatives should, contra Will, stay within the Republican fold, although they should also be much more willing than Kristol to challenge GOP orthodoxy on economic matters.