HOW MIGHT Republicans stop Donald Trump? A gathering of twenty-nine Trump supporters this week in northern Virginia mostly offered lessons in how not to do it. The three-hour session on the night of December 9th was organised by Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican media consultant, for the benefit of CBS television and a dozen or so invited reporters, among them your columnist. The Trump supporters—all of whom voted Republican in the 2012 presidential election, and who ranged fairly widely in income and education—were asked to rate a series of TV attack ads, pounding their hero as a liar, a hypocrite, a flip-flopper and a bully. The attacks were almost comically ineffective, as the group twisted itself into knots to avoid criticising the Republican front-runner.

One campaign spot showed old footage of Mr Trump voicing any number of conservative heresies: from defending legal abortion to praising Hillary Clinton. Another caused a few ripples of unease: a doomy, downbeat series of interviews with blue-collar folk and small contractors who had suffered when doing business with Mr Trump’s property empire, and blamed him for the loss of their jobs. “Did those companies perform?” a supporter asked, to murmurs of agreement. Perhaps all the facts were not known, said another—though one man did say he had become marginally less likely to vote for Mr Trump.

It was the same when group members were shown 15 crass or mendacious tweets sent out by Mr Trump, and were asked to pick the one that bothered them the most, when it came to choosing a future president. The winner, picked by 16 of the 29, was from April, when the property tycoon retweeted a supporter’s observation: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”

Still, the supporters fell over themselves to offer excuses. “He’s just a regular guy,” said one. “You don’t think Hillary Clinton says things like that in private?” said another.

It was the same throughout the session—which was in essence a repetition of a private focus group conducted by Mr Luntz a few months ago, recreated in Alexandria with new participants in order to show the press Mr Trump’s astonishing immunity to criticism. Supporters repeatedly twisted themselves in knots to exonerate Mr Trump.

The press are biased, reporters are “assholes” and “socialists”, it was declared. Perhaps the businessman had been provoked. If a Black Lives Matter protester was assaulted at a rally, why, that was not Mr Trump’s fault, it was his security guards (and no matter than Mr Trump was filmed snarling: “Get him the hell out of here” and later mused: “Maybe he should have been roughed up a little”).

More broadly, it was deemed “refreshing” or “entertaining” when Mr Trump abused and insulted his Republican rivals. It made him human: everyone has an uncle who gets drunk at Thanksgiving and says things, it was averred. He was exaggerating for effect, and once he was president would surround himself with people who would coach him.

Conventional wisdom has it that die-hard Trump supporters are bigots, driven to rage by economic and social changes that have disempowered the white working-class. Though a single focus group can only offer anecdotes, not data, that description is missing some important details.

It is true that Mr Trump’s call for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering America was greeted by some at the session with growls of sectarian approval. “I’ve read the Koran,” said one participant. “It says what it is purported to say. I know it says you come across a non-Muslim, you kill him or convert him.”

But it mattered to several of the 29 there to insist that they were not bigots. Mr Trump had only called for a “temporary” ban on Muslim arrivals, they argued, and the media had lied about his plan (actually, the businessman’s proposal has been evolving as he offered clarifications and exceptions). What those more squeamish members of the group said they wanted was better screening to find terrorists, and more honesty about the danger posed by many Muslims. There was loud agreement with a frequent Trump line, that political correctness is killing Americans, by causing people to think twice before reporting suspicious activities by immigrants, foreigners or Muslims. The shootings in San Bernardino had proved Mr Trump right, it was said. A man complained that the attorney-general, Loretta Lynch, had gone out and said she was worried about “angry talk at Muslims”. That’s absurd,” he scoffed. “My biggest concern is my family’s safety.”

At the end Mr Luntz, who has made a highly-successful career as a conservative-whisperer, crafting the phrases and arguments that move Republican hearts, came behind the one-way mirror that separated his focus group from his invited reporters, and said he had never seen another candidate who was so immune to negative information. “Normally, if I did this for a campaign, I’d have destroyed the candidate by this point,” he said.

Mr Luntz also highlighted the risk to establishment Republicans, noting that when the 29 supporters were asked who they would support in a three-way election with Hillary Clinton, Senator Marco Rubio as the Republican nominee, and Mr Trump as an independent, 19 of them said they would stick with Mr Trump. “The Republican establishment just had a heart attack,” Mr Luntz told the supporters in the room, who cheered, saying they were “tired of weak candidates”. When the Republican nominee was switched to Senator Ted Cruz, the most hardline right-winger in the presidential field, 14 of 29 supporters said they would still stick with the businessman.

Mr Luntz knows his party. But three thoughts struck Lexington. The first is that in their twisting and turning to defend Mr Trump, the 29 actually sounded rather familiar. They sounded exactly like conservative talk-radio hosts, from Rush Limbaugh to Mark Levin. In conservative radio-land, retreat is never the right tactic. When a favoured hero is caught lying, or embarrassing news breaks, the trick is to counter-attack: to accuse the “mainstream media” of lying, or twisting facts, or of operating a double-standard (a favourite defence is to demand: “so why do they never challenge the left when they do far worse?”). To some extent, Mr Trump’s genius is to bottle that essence of talk-radio tribalism, and take it on the campaign trail.

Second, the 29 Trump supporters did not sound like kamikaze-style protest voters. Go to enough Tea Party rallies, and you will meet ultra-conservatives who say that it makes no difference whether Republicans or Democrats win elections, because both parties are the same. This group was different. Your reporter was allowed to emerge from the one-way mirror and ask them some questions directly. One was whether they would still stick with Mr Trump if it could be proved to them beyond all doubt that they were making a Hillary Clinton win inevitable. “Anyone but Hillary” came the cry, as the group overwhelmingly agreed that they would fall into line and vote Republican over Mr Trump. Instead, they spent much of the three hours trying to explain (and perhaps to reassure themselves) why Mr Trump is in fact the best placed candidate to beat Mrs Clinton.

That level of self-delusion suggests a final point; “self-” is the right prefix, when talking about Trump voters. The most revealing moment of the session came when they were asked for words or phrases that captured their feelings for Mr Obama. They did not just respond with a torrent of vitriol, spitting out words like: “arrogant”, “lost”, “out of his depth”, “delusional” and “un-American”. More strikingly, they described a president who scorns and disrespects them, as if he stands at the apex of a pyramid of sneering, un-American elitism, supported by a hateful mainstream media.

“We’re the bad guy under Barack Obama,” complained a Trump fan. “It’s always our fault.” The president was “like a disappointed parent,” grumbled another. A woman said she was “tired” of being made to feel by Mr Obama that everything she did was wrong and a “bad thing”. With Mr Trump, Americans were made to feel that they deserved the good things that they aspired to.

This matters. Looking at polls that show how the most loyal Trump supporters are whites without a college education, it is too easy to cast their backing as a primal bellow of rage by society’s losers. But the crowd gathered in northern Virginia included several college graduates, at least one teacher, the owner of a small business providing event security and the former mayor of Waukesha, a small city in Wisconsin. What they described was not so much primal rage as deep resentment that they, as individuals, have a sense of how America should be, and of how it is going wrong. They are sure that they know exactly how dangerous many Muslims are, and how the country is made less safe by admitting them. They find it self-evident that this president is destroying the country. But sneering, elite political correctness smothers them and silences them and seeks to deny the evidence they are sure that they have seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears.

Mr Trump offers them something that they crave: validation. What is more, as a billionaire who could be a member of the elite but chooses not to be, he offers them validation that—they feel—puts the Obamas of this world in their place.

So how do Republicans stop Mr Trump? An alarming thought arises. When Republican leaders in Congress and presidential rivals this week denounced his call to ban Muslim travellers as “unconservative” and an affront to American values, that may have been a high-risk tactic. For his supporters want to be told that they are right, and good people. They are sick of being chided, and put down and corrected—even when they are citing “evidence” that is half- or wholly-nonsense.

Quite possibly, for the Republican Party, the best way to rob Mr Trump of his supporters is to find a rival willing to pander, flatter and cajole those who currently love him—offering them a resentful, nationalist pitch just a notch less toxic than Mr Trump’s. As it happens, the New York Times had a scoop this week about Senator Ted Cruz. The Texan was recorded telling a private fundraising meeting with donors in New York that his approach to Mr Trump and another outsider-candidate, Ben Carson, was “to bear-hug both of them and smother them with love”. That matches his public actions: unlike most of his rivals, Mr Cruz has declined to condemn Mr Trump for calling for the borders to be closed to Muslims, merely saying that he prefers his plan, which involves excluding refugees from Iraq, Syria and a range of other terror-racked countries. Mr Cruz predicted that “gravity” would bring down both the Trump and Carson campaigns. And then, he told his donors: “the lion’s share of their supporters come to us.”