Recently disclosed audio and video footage of Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women with impunity due to his star power has set off a cascade of Republican defections, concentrated among, but not limited to, officeholders who face competitive elections next month.

The abruptness with which these one-time endorsers abandoned their party’s presidential nominee, citing in many cases their wives and daughters as inspirations for their decisions, raises questions about whether these Republicans know any Mexican immigrants or Muslims, given Trump’s similarly offensive comments about those groups.

But the growing consensus that Trump should relinquish the GOP nomination has revealed something more odious than American conservatism’s familiar lack of basic empathy.

Whether they’ve opposed Trump from the outset, as a small subset of Republicans can claim to have been, or come to their opposition abruptly, in the past 24 hours, these party actors aren’t proposing to cede the presidential election, while working to shore up down-ballot races. They are arguing that, at bottom, and despite everything we’ve seen the party stoop to in the past year, Republicans still deserve to control the entire government. They are entertaining the anti-democratic fantasy of sweeping their Trump enablement out of memory and grabbing the country’s levers of power in an unwelcome, Trumpian fashion.

In rescinding his endorsement, Idaho Senator Mike Crapo said, “I urge Donald Trump to step aside and allow the Republican party to put forward a conservative candidate like Mike Pence who can defeat Hillary Clinton.”