Barack Obama delivers nuclear weapons and $150 billion to America’s mortal enemy in the Middle East – and every Democrat to a man and woman defends his betrayal; Hillary Clinton violates the Espionage Act and delivers classified secrets, including information on an impending drone attack, to America’s enemies – and every Democrat to a man and woman defends her. Obama and Clinton lie about matters of war and peace – and every progressive publicly swears they are telling the truth.

But when Donald Trump insinuates the president is a man of uncertain loyalties, Republican leaders back away from him. When Trump proposes fighting “radical Islam,” securing America’s borders, stopping unvetted immigration from Muslim terrorist states, surveilling mosques, and scrutinizing the families of terrorist actors, Republicans join Democrats in denouncing him, or take an uncomfortable distance or maintain a silence that leaves him to fend for himself.

The left is blaming Christians, Republicans, and guns for the Orlando slaughter. The president and Hillary are claiming that ISIS is on the run – a lie flatly contradicted by the CIA director himself. They want to disarm Americans. If Hillary is elected, borders will stay open, and protecting Muslims will take priority over fighting Islam’s holy war against us.

In other words, Democrat betrayers of America are on the attack, while Republican leaders who claim to be patriots are on the run. Where, to take one example, is Ted Cruz? He claims to be a patriot and care about the Constitution, but he is AWOL — sulking like Achilles in his tent over personal slights he can’t get past to fight for his country’s survival. The Republican leader of the Senate and his second-in-command have both announced they will not participate in the presidential election, while the leader of the House makes clear his extreme embarrassment over Trump’s proposals to establish immigration policies appropriate to a nation under siege. This is the sad state of the Republican forces in retreat in an election campaign that will decide the fate of our country.

There are actually two wars we are engaged in– one with the Islamic caliphate and the other with an American left that refuses to recognize the enemy we face or the magnitude and nature of the threat. In this internal war, too many on the right have taken a course whose only practical effect can be seen as a betrayal of their cause. Erick Erickson has summed up the view of the Republican renegades in this succinct phrase: “We are in the midst of a murder-suicide pact that will be our ruination.”

This is, in fact, a precise description of what the #NeverTrump right is up to. But in Erickson’s inversion of reality, it is “the Republican Party [that] intends to murder the nation and commit suicide along the way.” What Erickson and his fellow saboteurs, led by Mitt Romney and Bill Kristol, want is for the Republican Party to block Trump and repudiate the record number of Republican primary voters who nominated him. This would actually be a Republican suicide in November – one that would indeed “murder the nation.”

Although the defection of the Republican leadership from the field of battle is still ongoing, there has been a break in the ranks of the #NeverTrump spoilers. Two of their leading intellectual figures, Hugh Hewitt and Andy McCarthy, have finally come to realize not just the futility of their efforts but their destructiveness as well. For the sake of the nation, let’s hope that there are a lot more such reversals on the way.

Meanwhile, the really big problem remains that of the Republican leadership, which thinks that “We’re stuck with Trump but we won’t dump him!” is an appropriate battle cry. As we all know, the Democrats are vicious, unprincipled attack dogs with a kept and unprincipled media in their camp. Passivity in the face of this blitzkrieg is, in practice, no different than a white-flag surrender. Paul Ryan summed up Republican fatuity in his answers to media questions in the wake of Orlando about whether he’s still supporting Trump. Ryan’s answer: he would be defending Republican principles in this election. Well, Paul, principles aren’t running in this election. Candidates are. And unless Republicans rally around Trump, and Trump beats Hillary, Republican principles are going down with him.