In the Cleveland debate, Donald Trump refused to commit to support whomever the Republican Party nominates in 2016.

Trump would be wise to maintain his freedom of action.

For there is a plot afoot in The Washington Post Conservative Club to purge Trump from the Republican Party before the primaries begin.

“A political party has a right to … secure its borders,” asserts the Post’s George Will, “a duty to exclude interlopers.” Will wants The Donald “excommunicated” and locked out of all GOP debates until he kneels and takes a loyalty oath to the nominee.

“Marginalizing Trump” carries no risk of “alienating a substantial Republican cohort,” Will assures us, for these “Trumpites” are neither Republicans nor conservatives. Better off without such trash.

The Post’s Michael Gerson says “establishment Republicans” must “make clear that [Trump] has moved beyond the boundaries of serious and civil discourse.” He loathes the Trumpites as much as Will.

Trump’s followers are “xenophobic,” Gerson tells CNN. They have a “resentment of outsiders, of Mexico, of China, and immigrants. That’s more like a European right-wing party, a UKIP or a National Front in France. Republicans can’t incorporate that.”

But if the GOP has no room for Trump’s followers, it has no future. For there simply aren’t that many chamber-of-commerce and country-club Republicans.

Gerson mentions with disgust the U.K. Independence Party and France’s National Front. What do those parties have in common?

Both are anti-New World Order. Both arose to recapture the lost independence and sovereignty of their nations from the nameless, faceless bureaucrats of Brussels, those EU hacks who now dictate the kinds of laws and societies the Brits and French are permitted to have.

What motivates these folks is not all that different from what brought the farmers to Lexington Green and Concord Bridge and inspired colonists to stand by the original Tea Party boys in Boston.

New parties arise and outsiders are drawn into politics to fill voids and vacuums created by the failure of incumbent parties and politicians.

Case in point: Ex-speechwriter Gerson’s boss George W. Bush.

With the country united behind him after 9/11, Bush called for war on an “axis of evil” — Iraq, Iran and North Korea — that had nothing to do with 9/11. He then persuaded Congress to authorize an invasion of Iraq to strip it of weapons of mass destruction it did not have.

Cost: 4,500 American dead, 35,000 wounded warriors, $1 trillion dollars sunk, 100,000 dead Iraqis, half a million widows and orphans, a country ravaged and a Mideast now awash in war and bloodshed.

Political result: The Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2006, and the White House in 2008 to an anti-war Democratic Senator whose voting record was identical to that of Bernie Sanders.

Yet the leading establishment candidate of the Republican Party elites, in national polls and cash raised, is Jeb Bush, who took five days to concede the war his brother started may have been a mistake.

And the leading candidate of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, voted for the war that proved a disaster and against the surge that staved off the disaster until the Americans departed.

Our Beltway elites are demanding that Trump apologize for his remarks about women. But when have they apologized for having inflicted this disaster upon our nation and the Middle East?

Thursday, the Census Bureau revealed that a record 42.1 million immigrants, here legally and illegally, are in the U.S., a population explosion being driven by Mexicans still flooding across the border.

Is it “xenophobic” to ask if Americans approve of this historic change in the composition and character of the country they love?

Is it outrageous to ask whether there is a correlation between this massive infusion of unskilled and semi-skilled labor from the Third World, and the stagnant and falling wages of native-born Americans?

The trade figures just came in for June. The trade deficit shot to $43.8 billion. Take out the $20 billion surplus in services, it was a $64 billion deficit in goods, pointing to a 2015 trade deficit of $750 billion in things Americans make with their hands, tools, machines.

This has been going on since Bush 41. And the correlation between these trade deficits and the trade deals our elites have negotiated is absolute. Trump says our negotiators have been getting their clocks cleaned by the Japanese, Chinese and Mexicans.

Is he wrong? Or are free trade and open borders now articles of faith, defined dogma, denial of which gets you excommunicated from the party of Gerson and Will?

Trump should tell the GOP, in the neocons’ favorite phrase, “All options are on the table.” And that includes the Samson Option.

ORDER IT NOW

Trump should tell the GOP that if it disrespects him and his followers, then he is prepared to do as did the biblical hero Samson, when, blinded and mocked by the Philistines, he pushed the pillars apart and brought the temple down upon the heads of them all.

The Republican establishment will understand that.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.”

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