Can I even call myself a Republican?

Over a year ago, on a walk with a friend through the thick DC humidity, we talked about campaigns and politics and the primaries. We talked about Trump and his outrageousness, his ignorance, and the dangers he’d pose to my party (not hers), and the dangers he’d pose to our world. But then, he was just a joke. I was angry about his comments, but I was still able to laugh them off. He wasn’t a serious threat to our world, because he couldn’t possibly win the nomination. Yet even then, I said to her,

“If Donald Trump wins the nomination, I don’t know if I can call myself a Republican any more.”

And that is where I am. The party I grew up in, the party I want to work in and change and push to be more inclusive, betrayed me and countless others. The party chose for its king a demagogue who wears a wig instead of a crown, and a celebrity in pursuit of fame and fortune rather than service and sacrifice.

If this is where the party is going — building walls to keep immigrants out, irrationally objecting to international trade, railing against marriage equality, then I’m gone. If this is where the nominee — who was for abortion before it was politically expedient, who is a racist and a misogynist, who wants to carpet bomb the Middle East and ban Muslims, wants to take the party — then I want nothing to do with it.

Loyalty to party can never trump loyalty to country. And loyalty to party means nothing when the party has been poisoned.

Whether the party can recover from this cycle remains to be seen. But it’s impossible to predict what will happen to the GOP a year from now. It’s impossible to discern whether this is a reckoning, or simply an adjustment. Whether the party will self-correct or has been irreparably damaged.

There are those who insist the party is dying, and the RNC was its wake. There are others who believe, perhaps naively, that a rebirth is possible. I am hopeful for a rebirth, a restart — but it will be impossible with Trump and his talk-radio minions at the helm.