For Donald Trump's fellow Republicans, this campaign is increasingly about binary choices, but not Donald versus Hillary; rather it's about denialism versus defection and denunciation versus renunciation.

The poster boy for denialism is House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose speech in Cleveland last month made him seem like he had wandered in from a different political convention. He gave an earnest, optimistic, forward-looking speech, a stark contrast to virtually everything else uttered from the podium that week. Ryan has seemed walled off from the actual political freak show going on around him. Occasionally reality intrudes and either he has to admit that Donald Trump is a racist or, as he said Thursday, that Trump's attacks on Khizr and Ghazala Khan are "beyond the pale." But he quickly reassures himself and anyone listening that said beyond-the-pale bigot is the most qualified choice for the presidency.

The case of the Khans is both the perfect illustration and, perhaps, catalyst for the destruction of the brief-lived GOP mainstream consensus regarding Trump. While an admirable subset of Republicans has remained steadily #NeverTrump even through his ascendance to party leadership, much of the establishment has adapted variations of an ignore-the-problem approach to Trump. Many condemn the sin whilst ignoring the very existence of the sinner. You'd think Lord Voldemort was running for president given how reluctant some Republicans seem to be to mention his name. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, defended the Khans without actually mentioning Trump, as if they had been subject to some sort of free-floating assault. Ryan's initial reaction was much the same.

Some did mention the nominee of course. Arizona Sen. John McCain issued a stern rebuke: "I cannot emphasize enough how deeply I disagree with Mr. Trump's statement," he said. "I hope Americans understand that the remarks do not represent the views of our Republican Party, its officers, or candidates." Never mind that the remarks represent the views of the Republican Party's most important candidate. New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte said she was "appalled" at Trump's feud with a Gold Star family. And Ryan, days after trying to support the Khans without mentioning Trump made his "beyond the pale" remarks in a radio interview Thursday, belatedly scoring his presidential nominee so that "people don't make the mistake of thinking we think like that." Where could they possibly get such an idea?

But here's the key thing: Do Ryan, McCain and Ayotte support Donald Trump for the presidency? Unwaveringly. When forced to answer for Trump by name the GOP formula has been denounce but don't renounce. (And Trump only underscores their fecklessness, refusing to endorse Ryan and McCain in their primaries and suggesting that Ayotte is "weak" and disloyal.) On one level their basic political calculation is understandable: They need Trump voters in order to survive in November; but they are in danger of disappearing into a growing chasm between those voters and everyone else.

You can see the signs of the latter in not only some GOPers, per The New York Times' Alexander Burns this week, starting to "entertain abandoning him en masse." This is usually late October, save-yourself stuff.

You can also see it in the growing trickle of Republicans to flee the Trump train are framing their decision as an attempt to save the country.

Drip: Meg Whitman, who was the GOP standard-bearer for governor of California in 2010, announced this week that she's going to vote and fundraise for Hillary Clinton because Trump is a dangerous "demagogue."

Drip: Retiring New York GOP Rep. Richard Hanna announced Tuesday that he was joining Team Clinton.

Drip: Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who is running for re-election disavowed Trump Wednesday without specifying who he'll vote for. "I'm an American before I'm a Republican," he told CNN.

Drip: Colorado Rep. Mike Coffman, who has pointedly declined to say who he's voting for, released a television ad promising to "stand up to" Trump if The Donald is elected president. Colorado should be a swing state but is generally now seen as being safely in Clinton's column.

Drip: Pennsylvania Rep. Charlie Dent announced Tuesday that he won't vote for Trump, who is too "incendiary."

Drip: Sally Bradshaw, a GOP strategist closely aligned to Jeb Bush who helped write the party's 2012 postmortem report fled the Republicans this week in favor of Clinton.

Drip: So too did Maria Comella, a former long-time staffer of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Drip: Former Rep. Vin Weber, who was a key figure in the 1994 Republican Revolution and has remained a lobbyist fixture of the party inside the Beltway, said that he's never-Trump and at least Hillary-curious.

That's all just this week and the list is growing.

Add up enough drops and you've got a flood. The interregnum is what The Washington Post's Greg Sargent has called the "dignity window," which for Republican leaders is inexorably closing. "If individual Republicans don't break off their support for Trump's candidacy now ... they run the risk of having no choice but to do so after Trump sinks even further into wretchedness and depravity, to a point of true no return," Sargent wrote this week. "At that juncture, their move will look unprincipled and desperate, leaving them stained – perhaps irrevocably – with their previous willingness to stick by him during much of his descent, and depriving their break with him of whatever moral force it might have had if done earlier."

Think of it as a party-wide Sarah Palin problem. John McCain permanently lost the benefit of the doubt of a lot of non-Republicans otherwise inclined to like if not support him when he tried to foist her on the nation as vice president.