In many ways, Donald Trump’s mesmerizing self-destruction last week seemed almost rehearsed, like a building implosion in human form. His fixation with settling the score against the Khan family was the primer charge, which triggered a series of connected explosives, resulting in this, from FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only forecast:





The process unfolded too rapidly for Republicans to cycle through the stages of grief over one explosion before another went off. In the crude overlap of anger, bargaining, and denial that resulted, some anti-Trump conservatives clung to the hope that Trump would leave the campaign, either voluntarily or through public pressure, and the party could press ahead to November with a new and not altogether unhinged nominee.

This isn’t contingency-planning so much as the kind of prayer an atheist might resort to in an earthquake. The desperation is understandable, of course: A horrific candidate like Trump threatens not just to cost Republicans the presidency, but to precipitate a down-ballot wipeout that erases the enormous gains the party has made in off-year elections during the Obama era.

But the #NeverTrump fantasy actually runs much deeper than salvaging purple-state Senate seats. As long as these conservatives are dreaming about the

unlikely scenario in which Trump exits the race, it’s worth contemplating how rapidly these conservatives would fall back in line as loyal Republican foot soldiers if that happened—and thus how fleeting some of their own critiques of their party at the moment really are.

If Trump stays in the race, and the #NeverTrump crowd ends up costing him the presidency, they will have done a remarkable thing for the country. But the irony is that the Republicans most committed to defeating Trump are generally the most misguided or in denial about the status-quo ante in Republican politics. They’ve blamed the party for being culpable in Trump’s rise. But they want the nominee out because, despite everything that’s happened, they still believe the GOP can be entrusted with control of every branch of government.