Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.

In the new Coen brothers comedy “Hail, Caesar!” Hollywood star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney, is kidnapped by a communist group and then suffers a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. After he’s released, he complains to his boss, production chief Eddie Mannix, about the exploitative nature of capitalism until Mannix, played by Josh Brolin, responds by repeatedly striking his face and yelling at him to get back to work.

This is approximately the role Mitt Romney tried to reprise on Thursday when he verbally slapped a Republican Party that, in the view of Romney and other GOP leaders, has been kidnapped by Donald Trump. If it were only so easy. Romney and the rest of the GOP establishment may be aghast at the heresies the minions are soaking up, but they themselves are culpable for much of the upheaval in the party. Who sought the benison of Trump other than Romney during the 2012 campaign? Who winked at the birth of birtherism? ("No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate,” Romney told a cheering crowd during the 2012 campaign. “They know that this is the place that I was born and raised.")


Romney is thus firing the first official shot of the Republican civil war at Fort Trumpter, and hostilities are fully underway. On Wednesday night, 60 Republican foreign policy mavens issued an open letter declaring that Trump would “make American less safe” and “diminish our standing in the world.” Meanwhile, Trump is gaining other supporters. When he appears to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, it will likely be to a record and rapturous crowd.

But despite his substantial lead in the polls, it’s not yet clear whether Trump will be the Robert E. Lee or Ulysses Grant of this war, or how total the war will be. Trump has not locked down the nomination, and the anti-Trump establishment is pursuing three lines of attack against him. The first line is what might be called a grand strategy approach. The party foreign affairs elite is depicting him as a reckless madman who isn’t fit to carry the nuclear suitcase, let alone have control over it. This approach had its birth in an impassioned essay published by Eliot A. Cohen, a former Bush administration official and head of the hawkish John Hay Initiative, in The American Interest. Cohen signaled that this was a fight to the finish with Trump: “The Republican Party as we know it may die of Trump. If it does, it will have succumbed in part because many of its leaders chose not to fight for the Party of Lincoln … ”

Now, in a letter that Cohen helped organize and that was signed by dozens of senior Republican foreign policy figures, including former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and neoconservative guru Robert Kagan, Trump was excoriated as “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle.” They also announced they would refuse to serve in a Trump administration, a sign of just how deep the rift is becoming between Trump and the rest of the party. What’s notable about the letter is that it does not consist solely of neoconservatives. It contains important practitioners of the realpolitik school of thought. Apart from Zoellick, Robert Blackwill, a former aide to Henry Kissinger and former high-ranking State Department official, affixed his name to the document. Kissinger himself, with his customary discretion, did not sign the letter. In praising the letter, Max Boot, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Commentary magazine that Trump is “emerging as the number one threat to American security”— even bigger than ISIL or China.

The second line is to attack Trump’s reputation as a straight-shooter who is calling out the establishment elites. By calling him a “fraud and phony” and casting aspersions on his business reputation, Romney has amplified Senator Marco Rubio’s depiction of Trump as a “con man.” At the Republican debate Thursday night both Ted Cruz and Rubio planned to pile on and create unease about Trump’s moral and business character.

The third line of assault on Trump, however, is for his opponents to focus on trench warfare. It is obviously for all the candidates to keep campaigning until Cleveland, lobbing verbal hand grenade after grenade at Trump so that he arrives at the convention not only with a lack of a delegate majority, but is also crippled as a candidate. This would require Rubio, the darling of the neocon establishment and Republican financiers, and Senator Ted Cruz to play tag-team and even contemplate joining forces as president and vice president. In this scenario, Rubio could rescue his faltering political career by helping to slay the Trump dragon. Whether Cruz can bring himself to cross the Rubiocon, however, may be the biggest question facing the establishment. Odds are that if Trump is close to the nomination, he will offer Cruz the vice-presidential slot and Cruz gets to maintain his anti-establishment bona fides. Another plus is that given how ill-equipped Trump is to function in the Oval Office, Cruz could play Dick Cheney to his George W. Bush.

But perhaps the sleeper candidate is Romney. All along his aides have been plotting and pleading with him to enter the race. Until now, Romney and the rest of the establishment has largely tried to ignore Trump. But he’s finally caught its attention. Trump’s most amazing accomplishment may have been to reanimate Romney. After bungling election after election, Romney has finally found his voice. His fusillade against Fort Trumpter will earn him the adoration of the establishment which has been pining for someone to take on Trump without hesitation.

Trump will scoff at Romney—as he did in a furious retort at a rally on Thursday, calling him a “choke artist” among other things—but with his own wealth and cadre of aides, Romney may well represent the greatest obstacle to the New York mogul securing the nomination. If Romney were to become the party’s candidate, he could run as a true moderate who was able to save not only the Republican Party from itself, but will also rescue America from the gridlock and division that a Clinton presidency promises.

The only way Romney could win the nomination is by letting the current rivals bloody each other until the grand finale in Cleveland. (And according to a new report from CNN, Romney has instructed his closest advisers to explore stopping Trump at the convention.) If the party magnates succeed in going to extra ballots, they might be able to persuade Romney to emerge as the party’s nominee.

The GOP civil war, however, would not end. It would simply have started. Trump would not go down quietly but continue to wage a guerrilla campaign, probably as a third party campaign, thereby ensuring Hillary Clinton’s victory.

But Democrats shouldn’t get overconfident, and predictions of the death of the GOP are decidedly premature (remember, the South did rise again eventually, effectively taking over the politics of the party of Lincoln). The last time something like this happened, what appeared to be a kind of death was followed by a resurrection. The GOP previously melted down at the San Francisco Cow Palace in 1964. Kissinger, Niall Ferguson reports in his new biography, found the frenzied cheering at the Cow Palace reminiscent of the Nuremberg Party rallies and surmised that a new European-style ideological force had been unleashed in America. The new tribune of the right, Barry Goldwater, won the nomination but went on to suffer a devastating defeat to Lyndon Johnson. Four years later, the Democrats self-destructed at their convention in Chicago, as Mayor Richard Daley’s goons charged the student protesters and Richard Nixon and the GOP captured the silent majority. Next, in 1980, Ronald Reagan, who mesmerized the right with his speech at the ’64 convention, won the White House.

The Democrats could win big this year, but they might remember how quickly the GOP has recovered from its past ideological battles before they start gloating too much.