On Super Tuesday, a cocky Donald Trump vanquished the Republican establishment.

On Payback Thursday, the establishment mounted a serious counterattack that undercut Trump’s chances in November and pushed the party into open civil war.


Telling his fans “We’ll have so much winning, you’ll get bored with winning” is a bombastic staple of Trump’s stump speech – he repeated it during a rally in Maine on Thursday – but his historic winning streak has created an intense and increasingly coordinated backlash against his candidacy, one aimed at undoing what the GOP’s fed-up voters have done in recent primaries.

“The party will not fracture but will likely splinter,” says former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, a senior party strategist. “The question is: How big will the piece that splinters off actually be?”

Matt Dowd, George W. Bush’s chief strategist in 2004, cast the day’s events in equally dramatic terms. “I think the GOP as a national party will have to be reconstituted,” he said. “There doesn't seem a good way to put this all together. If Trump is the nominee, there will be a third-party establishment conservative running. If he gets taken out, he will run.”

A winner like Trump who enjoys a commanding lead this late in the nominating process should be transitioning to a general-election strategy against his likely opponent Hillary Clinton. Trump wants to, but he can’t. He tried to make that pivot this week, releasing his health care plan and defending Planned Parenthood, but was forced to battle a growing insurrection in his own ranks – led by the party’s 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who labeled him “a fraud” and “a phony” who represented “a brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”

In a rambling, often hilarious, often savage, often defensive 50-minute speech carried live by the cable networks, Trump dismissed Romney as a “failed candidate” who “was begging for my endorsement” in 2012.

“I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees,’” added Trump in a crass wisecrack that had his audience hooting in Portland, Maine.

Still, his signature smirk masked a front-runner at an inflection point: Trump has already shown an ability to rhetorically dismantle any single politician who opposes him – including Romney, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. But those individual rivals, like insurgents liberated from the constraints of conventional warfare by defeat, are aligning en masse to oppose his candidacy, less constrained by any one candidate’s desire to win than by a common goal of disposing of a man they deem unfit to lead their party.

Several senior GOP operatives who spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity believe that the remaining non-Trump candidates – Cruz, Rubio and John Kasich – will start coordinating their anti-Trump attacks soon, perhaps as early as Thursday’s debate in Detroit, in hopes of denying the developer the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination. From there, they say, it would be every man for himself at a contested convention.

“I think camps are coming to the realization that if no one is going to drop, at least let’s not hurt each other and keep him under the 1,237,” said one veteran Republican strategist.

On Thursday cracks were appearing up and down the party’s embattled superstructure. Next month, the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group of powerful GOP donors, will gather at the Venetian Hotel and Resort, which is owned by Republican benefactor and RJC board member Sheldon Adelson, for their annual spring meeting. Attendees are likely to vent their disgust with Trump, who has been slow to disavow support by white supremacist groups. And at the meeting, according to two sources familiar with its planning, the RJC is expected to take up a pressing question: whether to even support Trump if he’s the GOP nominee.

Other strategists tasked with running congressional and gubernatorial races are deep into discussion about what impact a Trump nomination would have on contests up and down the ballot. Some outside groups have already begun polling the question.

Several senior Republicans told POLITICO that many Republican candidates would be forced to run against Trump, especially those running for non-federal offices such as governor. For House and Senate candidates, however, the task will be far more difficult, a problem Speaker Paul Ryan – Romney’s 2012 running mate – and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are known to be grappling with.

GOP legislative candidates would have to walk a shaky tightrope – embracing some of the populist positions that have made Trump popular, while distancing themselves from his flip-flops and most outrageous pronouncements. Trying to run away from Trump entirely, some top party strategists argue, won’t work. They compare a Trump autumn to the no-win situation Democrats faced in 2010 and 2014, when House and Senate candidates – like Arkansas’ doomed duo Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor – tried to run away from Obama, only to lose support from the party’s base of progressives and African Americans.

Within the GOP, there are two emerging Hail-Mary theories about how to deprive Trump of the delegates he needs to seal the deal, according to senior Republicans interviewed by POLITICO.

Theory No. 1 is that two of the three remaining Trump rivals drop out and unite behind the lone surviving contender, allowing that person take on the New York businessman, mano à mano. Proponents of this theory note that Trump has yet to win an outright majority of the vote in any of the states that have held nominating contests so far – suggesting that the anti-Trump vote may be larger.

Theory No. 2 is that the three Trump rivals should stay in the race to collectively rob him of delegates in upcoming primary states, while attacking him as a group.

Proponents of this theory – which Romney hinted at in his speech today – argue that it can work if Kasich wins Ohio, Rubio wins Florida, and Cruz wins some upcoming Southern states and Midwestern caucuses. The key to this strategy is halting Trump in Florida, a winner-take-all delegate honey-pot where polls show the businessman leading Rubio. Three anti-Trump groups – Club for Growth, Our Principles PAC, and American Future Fund – have laid down TV buys in the state over the last few days. The three groups have begun back-channel conversations – coordinating their plans and messages.

All this scheming comes against a backdrop of accelerating criticism of Trump from all quarters of the party. The GOP’s 2008 nominee John McCain – another Trump target – stepped up his criticisms of the front-runner, endorsing Romney’s view that Trump’s inexperience and shoot-from-the-hip style could endanger the country’s already-perilous national security situation. The Arizona Republican endorsed a Wednesday letter, co-signed by former GOP defense officials, warning against Trump’s “vision of American influence and power in the world,” which they said “swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.” Referring to the missive, McCain dinged Trump for making “uninformed and indeed dangerous statements.”

A growing number of prominent leaders – including Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse – are emerging to say they will not support Trump under any circumstances. They are joined by an increasingly agitated of group conservative intellectuals who have taken to the pages of National Review and, more recently, Twitter, to form a “Never Trump” movement.

No matter what happens, a number of senior party strategists are convinced that there will be a fight of some kind at the convention. With so much resistance to him from the establishment, a confrontation of some kind is inevitable – and there are several hypothetical scenarios, including 11th-hour rules changes, that insurgents could use to delay Trump’s nomination.

Others don’t buy it. For all the fretting now, they argue, the GOP has too much at stake – and predict that most of the party will ultimately unite against their common enemy, the hated Hillary Clinton.

“In the end, it pulls itself together to win, and that’s what’s going to happen in the convention and after,” said New York GOP Chairman Ed Cox.

And some senior former Romney aides questioned their old boss’s call to arms. “This is a process that is going to have to work itself out,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s senior campaign adviser four years ago. “For all his faults, Trump is conservative in many of his positions – in his tax policy, his desire for a strong military and his plans to secure the border. Most importantly, Trump has promised to appoint a Supreme Court justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia to fill the current vacancy on the court.”

“I don’t know of any conservative who wants to hand the White House to Hillary Clinton so that she can remake the court in her own image.”

Scott Reed, chief political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – a bastion of the GOP establishment – says Trump’s fate is in his hands, noting the developer’s conciliatory speech after the polls closed on Tuesday.

“Trump needs to continue his election-night message of unity,” Reed said.

But anger at the anger-impelled front-runner seems to be intensifying – and Trump on Thursday reiterated his intention not to “back down” from any fight.

Romney’s speech – unprecedented in recent Republican history – came in the context of a general establishment backlash but it reflected his personal feelings about the man who seems likely to succeed him as the Republican nominee. He spent months stewing in anger over Trump. He’s been calling top aides, sounding them out on his ideas and telling them he’s been anxious about the businessman’s rise.

In the weeks leading up to the address, Romney’s anger hardened as he watched Trump rack up primary wins across the country – and his disappointment at Rubio’s inability to close the sale with voters grew.

Asked on the morning after Super Tuesday how Romney was feeling about Trump’s big night, one of the governor’s top associates responded: “Not happy.”