In a phone interview, Moore described Trump as the embodiment of cultural decadence — the personification of the moral decline he says Christian leaders have struggled to halt for the past generation.

“Some high profile evangelicals are completely repudiating the conviction that character matters,” Moore said. He described Trump as a

Howard Stern conservative, a reflection of the pornographic culture combined with proletarian demagoguery. Some of the older generation of evangelical leaders standing behind Donald Trump should imagine what they would say if a Democratic candidate had done or said any of the things that Trump has, his boasts of adultery, his profiting from casinos, his putrid speech about minorities and women.

Wherever he goes in religious circles, Moore said, Trump is the dominant subject of discussion: “How do we maintain the witness of the Christian church at a time when America seems to have gone crazy?”

Despite the critique voiced by Moore and other conservative Christians, Trump won a plurality of the white evangelical primary vote, often by margins well into the double digits in such former confederate states as South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi.

In every recess of the right, the struggle between those who would accede to the political verdict rendered in the primaries so far and those who would stand on principle against Trump is playing itself out. Two influential Republicans on opposing sides are Erick Erickson, the Georgia-based conservative commentator, and Ed Rogers, who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations and is now chairman of the Washington lobbying firm the BGR Group.

In his regular Washington Post column, Rogers affirmed his commitment to bend to the will of the Republican primary electorate:

The truth is we either have primaries or we don’t; we either have rules or we don’t. What’s worse for a democracy: When a bad guy gets elected or when the losers refuse to lose? Whoever wins the primaries and is compliant with the rules should be the Republican nominee. Period.

Erickson is having none of that. In an essay called “The Will of the People is Crap,” he declared:

I don’t give a damn about the will of the people. I’m telling you that I personally will not ever support Donald Trump. If you don’t like it, deal with it. It’s the will of this person! The will of the people is just a polite way of saying the collective, which is the authoritarian, socialist destiny of this nation if Donald Trump is elected. I want no part of it and will play no role other than to stop Donald Trump.

It’s hard to see how Trump, if he wins the nomination, could emerge from the Republican wreckage he leaves in his wake to actually win the general election — an assessment supported by the findings of a March 9 ABC/Washington Post poll. Not only did Hillary Clinton beat Trump 50-41 in the survey’s match up among registered voters, but 67 percent of voters had a negative view of Trump, 15 points more than Clinton.

While only 37 percent of those polled considered Clinton “honest and trustworthy,” even fewer, 27 percent, believe that those words accurately describe Trump. When voters were asked if Clinton and Trump have the experience and personality to serve as president, Clinton beat Trump by 66-26 and 58-26 respectively.

It is universally acknowledged, however, that this is not a normal election. One of Trump’s talents is the destruction and humiliation of his opponents, as the Republican candidates who have dropped out one after another can testify.