DETROIT — The high-speed unraveling of the Republican Party somehow accelerated further on Thursday, as the party’s last two presidential nominees joined the chorus of establishment voices warning voters not to allow Donald Trump to become the GOP’s standard-bearer.

What they’re struggling to come to grips with is that Trump already is.


In the hours before the GOP debate here Thursday night, Mitt Romney offered his own thorough, pragmatic denouncement of his party’s presidential frontrunner in Salt Lake City, labeling Trump as a “phony” and a “fraud” who might destroy the GOP, and warning that his demagoguery is reminiscent of a “brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”

Hours later, Trump responded in typical fashion — with a crude sex joke.

"I backed Mitt Romney. He was begging for my endorsement," Trump said at a rally in Portland, Maine Thursday. "I could have said 'Mitt, drop to your knees.' He would have dropped to his knees."

Romney actually predicted that Trump would respond by attacking him “with every imaginable low-road insult,” which he posited should tell voters “about his temperament, his stability, and his suitability to be president.” But he also knows that Trump has been firing personal insults at everyone in his path for months, and only boosting his brand. And he even dabbled in Trump-esque insults, questioning his narrative of business success, ticking off bankruptcies and abandoned efforts. “What ever happened to Trump Airlines?” Romney said. "How about Trump University? And then there's Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage?”

"A business genius he is not.”

The GOP debate on Thursday night kept the conversation in the muck, with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio desperately trying to unmask Trump as a fake conservative and greedy billionaire who has no interest in helping out the common man. Trump again responded with a coarse tongue, saying that he needed to clear the air about a previous insult from Rubio about his "small hands."

"I have to say this, he hit my hands,” Trump said about Rubio. “Nobody has ever hit my hands. I’ve never heard of this one. Look at those hands. Are they small hands? And he referred to my hands if they’re small, something else must be small," Trump said, as he flashed his hands for the crowd. "I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.”

The growing discord and contrasting styles are just the latest illustration of a party at war with itself amid a nomination fight that veered off the rails a long time ago. This rising clamor is the sound of a fragile Republican Party, a coalition held together in recent years by fraying threads between the donor class and the grassroots, breaking apart.

John McCain, who also chimed in Thursday, urged voters to come to their senses. “I want Republican voters to pay close attention to what our party’s most-respected and knowledgeable leaders and national security experts are saying about Mr. Trump, and to think long and hard about who they want to be our next commander in chief and leader of the free world,” he said.

(His spokeswoman later clarified to POLITICO, however, that he wouldn’t rule out voting for Trump in November: "As Senator McCain has said, he will support the Republican nominee.”)

But the hard reality is likely that their voices no longer matter to the party’s rank-and-file voters, at least not those backing Trump, who revel in his upending the party’s establishment class of Washington power brokers and K Street consultants. At his raucous rally in Portland, Maine, on Thursday, Trump dismissed Romney as “a failed candidate” who “let us down.”

When Romney and McCain ask Trump supporters to come to their senses, they fail to recognize that the voters backing him feel as if they already have. Their rejection of these past establishment-backed nominees, who have failed to deliver the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, not to mention the current crop of mainstream contenders, and their embrace of Trump has little to do with ideology or the “conservative movement” Romney and Marco Rubio believe they must save. They, too, see Trump as a wrecking ball. They just happen to be okay with that.

“It helps Donald Trump when the establishment piles on to him, because that’s one of the reasons people love him—because he’s not the establishment,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign, said Thursday.

Romney’s own suggested strategy, which at best would lead the GOP into a contested convention in July, underlines the position of weakness Trump has put the establishment in. The former Massachusetts governor proposed that voters in Florida and Ohio, forthcoming battlegrounds where the outright winner will take all of the delegates at stake, unite behind their own native son, Rubio and Kasich, respectively, in order to assure that Trump doesn’t win.

Kasich shrugged off that idea Thursday afternoon in Detroit, urging his Florida supporters to stick with him and vowing to win Ohio—which he acknowledges would only be enough to propel him to a contested convention, one he joked would be on friendly turf in Cleveland.

Trump hasn’t just accentuated the chasm between the establishment and the activist base—he’s splintering the establishment itself. While Romney, several senators and some major donors, who are readying an anti-Trump ad blitz in Florida through a super PAC, are finally digging in to fight, other establishment figures are warning against a misguided, quixotic crusade that supplants a democratic process.

Following Romney’s speech, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, not exactly a darling of the tea party, didn’t mince words in a Facebook post: “Here’s my message to the Republican Party leaders: Focus more on listening to the American people and less on trying to stifle their voice.”