Credit where credit is due: The #NeverTrump Republicans never give up, despite repeated failures. They have the resiliency of Wile E. Coyote, picking themselves up after each failed plot backfires and redoubling their efforts to destroy their foe with ill-conceived plans. Over the last six months, they were unable to dislodge Trump from frontrunner status, unable to prevent him from winning enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee, unable to find anyone (even the obscure pundit David French) willing to run as an independent candidate for the conservative cause. After failure upon failure, #NeverTrump has one more cockamamie scheme: Get the Republican National Committee to change the rules at the convention, “unbinding” delegates so that they can vote for another candidate and deny Trump the nomination.

For #NeverTrump advocates, a last-ditch coup became all the more pressing after Trump’s racist attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel showed that he won’t moderate himself for the general election, but will press on with the sort of incendiary language that plays better with Republican voters than the national electorate. Chatter about a convention coup is being spurred by Republican officials like A.J. Spiker, former Iowa Republican Party Chairman, and pundits like Erick Erickson and Hugh Hewitt. “I want to support the nominee of the party, but I think the party ought to change the nominee,” Hewitt said yesterday on his widely syndicated radio show. “Because we’re going to get killed with this nominee.”

As Spiker told BuzzFeed yesterday, “There’s a long history in the Republican Party of delegates voting their conscience. There is a path for the party to go in a different direction than Trump. The delegates are the ultimate authority of the Republican Party.”



Theoretically, it’s possible: The RNC’s 112-member rules committee could vote to let “bound” delegates—who are supposed to cast votes reflecting their states’ primary results—go free. But in practical terms, it’s ludicrous—and would guarantee that Republicans suffer catastrophic losses in November.

This scheme has the same fatal flaw that undid all earlier #NeverTrump strategies: It completely ignores the preferences of Republican voters. The GOP elite might be worried about how Trump’s racist smear looks, and fretful about all the other blow-ups to come, but there is no indication that Republican voters share this concern. According to a YouGov Poll, 65 percent of Republicans think Trump’s remarks were not racist, as against 22 percent who say they were. (Republican opinion is at odds with the nation at large: More than half the public, and 81 percent of Democrats, found the remarks to be racist.)