Lindsey Graham, who in December asked, “You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell,” and continued, “He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn't represent my party. He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for .... He's the ISIL man of the year.”

Lindsey Graham, who in March said Trump should have been expelled from the Republican Party.

Graham hated both Trump and Ted Cruz so much that he once likened the contest between the two of them to a choice between being shot and poisoned. As a result, it was a major milestone in the Republican establishment’s drive to stop Trump this spring when even Graham—who had quipped, “If you kill Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you”—endorsed Cruz.

Graham still didn’t love his Texas colleague, as a hilarious Daily Show appearance demonstrated, but he was willing to back him because he hated Trump so much more. Pressed by Trevor Noah on why he was backing Cruz, Graham offered that “he’s not completely crazy” and “that he’s not Trump.”

“If Donald Trump carries the banner of my party, I think it taints conservatism for generations to come,” Graham added. “I think his campaign is opportunistic, race-baiting, religious bigotry, xenophobia … other than that he’d be a good nominee.”

In early May, Graham said that Trump’s foreign policy would lead to another 9/11. And he told CNN that he couldn’t vote for either Trump or Clinton.

Yet Graham has now decided that maybe Trump is good enough after all. The reported switch doesn’t come from a vacuum. Since Trump locked up the GOP nomination, he has begun reaching out to some top Republicans, and the two men had what Graham called a “cordial, pleasant” phone call about foreign policy.

But if Lindsey Graham of all people can come around to Donald Trump, what Republican can’t? Increasingly, it seems that the only figures of any profile who aren’t backing Trump are an increasingly embattled group of staunchly principled conservative journalists and pundits. It’s harder and harder to find elected or appointed party figureheads who stand with them—though a few, like Ted Cruz and the Bushes, who have remained silent for now.

The other notable Trump endorsement over the weekend came from Foster Friess, the conservative megadonor who came to national prominence during the 2012 GOP primary—backing Rick Santorum over the less socially conservative and overall more moderate Mitt Romney. Now Friess has decided to support Trump, who is far more socially moderate than Romney was, and hardly an orthodox conservative on a range of other issues.

The way Friess justified his endorsement is peculiar. “My success came from harnessing people’s strengths and ignoring their weaknesses,” Friess wrote in an email to The Hill. “And also, from assessing people not according to their pasts or where they are today, but rather based on what they can become.” In other words, Friess is saying that Donald Trump cannot be judged on what he has said or done—either in the past or in the present. That analysis is either oracular or delusional. It implies that Trump will either betray the supporters who have brought him this far or else disappoint the new ones like Friess who are sure he can change.