It's been a little over a year now. It's been a year of spectacle and showmanship, fury and farce, demagoguery and disaster. A year in which Donald Trump's con game tricked about 35% of Republicans into voting for him, before Vichy Republican leaders meekly bowed to his will.

The single worst major party nominee in modern history — a man who has no political core, lies practically every time he speaks and is patently unstable — reached this point because every leader and institution in my party, the Republican Party, has failed again and again to grapple with the grim realities of Trump's impact on the election, the conservative movement and the character of our nation.

And so, now, here we are: As revealed by poll after poll, Americans feel worn down by the dirty, ugly character of the dirty, ugly candidate at the top of the GOP ticket.

It's not just that, in the wake of the Democratic Convention, Hillary Clinton has surged ahead in national polls by seven, nine, 15 points.

Trump ‘afraid the election’s going to be rigged’

She is far ahead in every state poll that matters. A Friday poll put her up slightly in Georgia, which has been reliable Republican territory in the last five elections.

Trump's entire path to victory has been predicated on winning white men, particularly less educated white men, in droves. Yet he is right now underperforming Mitt Romney's 2012 showing among whites, men, white evangelicals and whites without a college degree, while hemorrhaging every other demographic.

A growing number of Americans are coming to the realization that Trump is more than just a political train wreck; he's a real threat to the nation, what with the fear of nuclear weapons and the sweeping power of the federal government in his tiny paws.

Those of us who believe, who know, that Trump is dangerous can't just settle for him being beaten in November. We need to ensure that he is on the business end of a decisive, humiliating defeat — so that the terribly divisive forces he has unleashed are delivered a death blow.

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The first reason the loss at the polls needs to be total: to snuff out the corrosive fiction that the system is rigged. Trump hasn't just leveled this charge, ridiculously, about the Republican primary, which he won despite the elites trying to stop him, and somewhat less ridiculously about the Democratic one. He's now complaining before the fact that the November election will be fixed.

You heard that this week first from Donald Trump's eminence beige Roger Stone, then from Trump's minions and sycophants, then from the wigged whiner himself.

The complaint is code for the fact that Trump, somewhere in his hindbrain, knows that he lacks the power, money, skills and the discipline to win this race. When the polls were breaking his way, our republic was perfect; the voters had spoken and he was "doing very, very well." Now that the worm is turned, the evil elites will do anything to stop him.

As though his demagoguery hasn't been poisonous enough already, now he needs his minions to believe that if and when he loses, it was because some nefarious conspiracy of state officials was sitting in dark rooms literally switching votes from Trump to Clinton.

Make him the biggest loser. (MOLLY RILEY/AFP/Getty Images)

It is, as President Obama pointed out Thursday, a ridiculous notion, one that's literally impossible given the way elections work in this country.

But it means that, if there's a loss by a slim margin in the popular vote or electoral college, millions of already embittered Americans, worked into a frenzy by a shameless leader who will surely refuse to accept the returns, will start the next four years convinced that the United States of America is little more than a banana republic — and the presidency of Hillary Clinton is irretrievably illegitimate.

That will be awful for the country.

The second reason Trump needs to fall hard in November is that the Party of Lincoln needs a complete, top-to-bottom reset — one that completely purges the Trumpkins who believe racial animus is a governing philosophy and that their ignorant and angry primal screams can ever build a Republican majority.

After a pretty decisive loss to Obama in 2012, the Republican Party produced an exhaustive, detailed post-mortem pointing the way forward, focused largely on how to better connect with the growing Latino vote.

None of the lessons were actually learned. All the recommendations about fixing the posture of the party have been treated as though they had been printed on toilet paper.

My Southern grandmother often used a phrase that a lot of folks south of the Mason-Dixon line of a certain age will remember. It was always delivered in a low, calm voice: "Go outside get a switch." You knew at that point that whatever childhood misbehavior you were engaged in was about to come to a halt, painfully.

Well, Trump voters, it's your turn. Go get a switch. I'm not going to coddle you and say you're really smart and good people and this is just a misunderstanding. That's just what the PC crowd does on the left.

Trumpkins don't deserve a participation trophy for wrecking the party and saddling the nation with Hillary. They made the crazy the enemy of the good, and centered an entire campaign on rage, fear and an eternally shrinking spiral of cult-worship and fanaticism.

They dragged one of America's great political parties from the back of a truck.

To begin to repair the damage done, they need to see not that their way almost succeeded, if only one or two states had broken differently. They must absorb the painful reality that their way cannot, will not, ever work again.

So when it's over, Trumpkins, remember: You're not purging us. We're purging you.

No more hate and reckless group blame. No more fact-free fearmongering. No more feeding the obese ego of a man who's transparently unfit for the job.

And after the party gets this philosophical poison out of its system, it needs to re-professionalize the way it wins elections. You'll see at the end of this race dozens of articles on how Hillary Clinton's team took the amazing data science and voter contact architecture created by Obama and enhanced it.

This wasn't rocket science; it's basic, professional campaigning. While Donald Trump was retweeting "White Genocide 1488 Ovenmaster," Clinton's campaign was building data files and contacting swing voters. While Trump was tweeting about "Crooked Hillary," she was having precisely targeted television ads aimed at swing voters in the suburbs of key cities in battleground states appearing at just the right moments. While Trump was depending on red hats and WWE rallies, her people have been going door-to-door by the thousands, knocking, talking, winning hearts and winning votes.

I know Trump fans think of professionalized campaigning like this: "We don't need you fancy smart people with experience and your campaign discipline and your writers and polls and your computers and your TV ads. All we need are hats and Trump's Twitter account. Hold muh beer while I build a wall and make Mexico pay for it."

They're wrong — but only a resounding defeat will get it through their thick skulls.

The next necessary lesson that will only be learned if the defeat is painful relates to the right-wing media.

Both the conservative movement and the country need a vibrant center-right media culture that challenges the predicates of the left, educates America on our beliefs and fights for a national political culture centered on personal liberty, economic freedom and constitutional values.

This year, with some notable exceptions, those journalists and media outlets sold themselves out for a ride on the Trump infotainment train. In previous years, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge and Fox News and the rest would have ripped Trump's record apart.

They would have called him too liberal. Too dirty. Too tied to the Clintons.

While they've screamed at the top of their lungs for decades now about ideological purity, about the need for great candidates in the mold of Ronald Reagan and for a party that can sell its message to America, this year they objectively and overtly sold themselves for ratings and clicks when Trump came on the scene. I hope he left a nice tip on the nightstand.

The financial temptation to repeat this kind of mistake is so powerful, only profound embarrassment will prevent it from repeating.

Perhaps the most important reason Trump needs to suffer an epic loss is to destroy the aura around Donald himself.

Donald Trump and the revolting personality cult he has built around himself are an affront to the Party of Lincoln, to constitutional conservatism and to the fundamental beliefs of the American republic.

That sounds sweeping and condemnatory, and it should. This isn't a normal political candidate in a normal political year. Only the short, sharp shock of a jarring defeat at the hands of the worst Democratic nominee possible will break us out of the direction Trump and Trumpism would take this nation.

We can't have four or eight or 12 or 16 years with an irresponsible almost-President gleefully undermining everything the next two or three Presidents and Congresses try to accomplish — while selling socks made in Vietnam branded with his logo, and probably reverse mortgages to boot.

He needs to be put as far into exile as is humanly possible so that the country can heal from the deep wounds he's inflicted upon it.

I want to be clear here. As a principled conservative, I loathe the high likelihood that Hillary Clinton will — barring a bear attack or some other unforeseen externality — win this election.

She'll nominate liberal Supreme Court justices. We'll lose religious liberty. We'll have our Second Amendment freedoms compromised. Chuck Schumer's immigration bill is going to be so bad it will make many of us beg for the Gang of Eight.

However, Trump would be far worse. He'd be more dangerous to our safety and our republic. And since I know his loss is coming, I pray to God that it is total. You should, too.

Wilson is a Republican political strategist.