Donald Trump's campaign has made people reassess the Bush family, particularly the grace and dignity they have shown throughout the election race. Credit:Daniel Acker/Bloomberg Of course others saw this end as inevitable earlier than Wednesday night. A couple of days beforehand Tim Miller, a Republican operative with experience in losing races – he was Jeb Bush's communications manager – wrote a piece describing the Trump campaign as a "death march". He wrote insightfully about the peculiar horror of working on a zombie campaign, and what the ordeal reveals about those caught up in it. "On Jeb Bush's campaign, we experienced one of the most painful and seemingly unending death marches imaginable. From the top of the polls in June to all but dead by October, with three long winter months to go before preliminary voting even began. "There are days when you just dream of not getting out of bed and having to see or talk to anyone to just have a momentary respite from the constant reminder of your failure. Any good mood could be stripped away by one glance at your phone revealing a new poll showing the campaign losing ground. It is all-encompassing."

Richard Nixon: brought down by the Watergate scandal. Through all that, Miller writes, Bush maintained his decency and compassion for his staff, taking responsibility for the whole benighted endeavour. (One of the few achievements of the Trump campaign has been to force a sceptical world to reassess the Bush family, if only to better consider its grace and dignity.) Jeb conceded after getting smashed in South Carolina, winning just 8 per cent of the vote to Trump's 32 per cent. That night he told his supporters: "The presidency is bigger than just one person … and it is certainly bigger than any candidate." He promised to do what he could to help whoever won the race unify the country and he walked off stage. Thursday night's presidential debate confirmed that Donald Trump's campaign has now become a zombie campaign. Credit:John Locher/AP This is not the Trump way.

Another man with significant pedigree in losing Republican races is Avik Roy, who advised Mitt Romney – who lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama – and later the 2016 primary candidates Rick Perry and Marco Rubio. Speaking with Fairfax Media, Roy notes that Trump is not in any real sense a Republican. He conducted a hostile takeover of the party by identifying and catering to an under-served section of the GOP vote – resentful older whites. It was marketing genius. As an outsider he had no Republican staff to help build his campaign, and instead hired a crew of mercenaries. They have little loyalty to Trump and none to the party. So as the death march begins they have little capacity or inclination to curb Trump's excesses, to force him to observe the basic traditions of American presidential politics, such as the gracious acceptance of defeat rather than the dangerous indulgence of claiming a rigged election while exciting racial animosities. To illustrate this point, Roy casts back to Richard Nixon, who lost the 1960 election in a close race to John F. Kennedy, a race that might have been decided by dodgy votes in Chicago. His aides told Nixon to contest but he refused, saying he did not want to look like a sore loser. So this is where we are. The Republican Party is locked into a death march being led by a bloke whose character looks poor when compared with Nixon, the president who talked of firebombing the Brookings Institution.

Campaigning in Ohio – where he leads by 0.6 per cent in an average of polls – on Thursday, Trump was in no mood to correct his careless words from the night before. Asked if he would accept the result of the election, Trump told his supporters: "I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win." This sort of behaviour is shocking to many observers, but not Roy. He notes that during the primary campaign Trump threatened to run as a third-party candidate if the Republican Party did not select him. He told his supporters not to bother voting for "down ballot" Republicans – those in congressional and gubernatorial races – who did not support him. As the death march goes on, the Republican establishment has already started letting blood. A sign of it was a spat on the MSNBC program Morning Joe on Thursday morning. The guest was Bill Kristol, the leading neo-conservative editor of The Weekly Standard. The host was the former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough.

Kristol, one of the earliest and staunchest of the Republicans' "Never Trump" faction, asserted that Trump was a "fluke candidate" who should be ignored come election night. Scarborough and his co-host Mika Brzezinski scoffed at the suggestion that Trump was a fluke and declared the Republican Party needed to "come clean" about his candidacy. Kristol, angry, accused Scarborough and Brzezinski of going soft on Trump and giving him free uncritical and very high-rating airtime during the primaries, in effect helping him win. The segment deteriorated into an angry, ugly slanging match, each blaming the other for the rise of Donald Trump. Back in North Carolina, the young Republicans were divided on who to blame for a candidacy one group's office-holder called "a joke". Some pointed the finger at Paul Ryan, the House Speaker who the establishment hopes will lead them out of the wilderness, some at Ted Cruz, the Tea Party champion who railed for years against the party hierarchy. None had any real idea at what would come next. To some, Trump's implosion will seem inevitable. We have always known who he was. He liked gold plate and private planes and chattel women, and most of all he liked himself. We knew this because he told us so in his TV show, his radio appearances, in his eponymous infrastructure.

We knew he was incapable of seeing the world clearly past his fingertips. But the death march need not walk this way. A different candidate, one more concerned about his party and his country, could face defeat differently. He or she could spend these last weeks highlighting the very real weaknesses in Hillary Clinton's candidacy, in her secrecy and tangled interests. He or she could fight hard to preserve the Republican Party's Senate and House majorities. He could turn down his divisive racial rhetoric. It was at this point of the campaign eight years ago that John McCain, then losing to Barack Obama, told an audience member in his crowd that Obama was not, as she had asserted, "an Arab". "I have to tell you, Senator Obama is a decent person and a person you don't have to be scared of as president of the United States," he told her.

But this is not the Trump way. The most optimistic Republicans view the death march as a necessary ordeal. When other Republicans were calling for Trump to somehow be forced from the Republican ticket earlier this month, the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist George Will wrote that he must remain in place. He argued the nation needed the pleasure of seeing Trump being made the thing he most disdains, "a loser," and that his presence would serve as a reminder to the party that "perhaps it is imprudent to nominate a venomous charlatan". Trump was the GOP's chemotherapy, he said.

If so, Roy is not sure that the death march will be curative. Still a staunch Republican, he believes that over a period of years his party has lost its way, turning from the tenets of classical liberalism towards a dark nationalism. Weighed down by the angry old white men that dominate its constituency, he says, the party has no interest in governing a large diverse nation, and therefore has no moral right to. According to Roy, the Republican Party must first tackle its moral problem before it does its political one. And that is certainly not Trump's way.