There will be those in the Republican and conservative establishment who will try to spin the Super Tuesday results. Some among the GOP chattering classes will tell you that Trump didn’t get the knock-out punch he wanted – that there is still a chance to restore order. Don’t believe it. The numbers make it clear that, for the Republican party, it’s Trumpocalypse Now.

While Ted Cruz won his home state of Texas as well as Oklahoma, and Rubio ran him close in Virginia and actually managed to win Minnesota, Trump dominated elsewhere. His success extended from Massachusetts to Georgia to Alabama to Tennessee to Oklahoma. He won in Ted Cruz’s south, and he won in the north-east, where a more establishment-friendly candidate like Marco Rubio was supposed to prevail.

Trump is winning with men and women, moderates and conservatives, with the young and the old.

Trump is winning despite a weekend of unforced errors – after failing to repudiate former Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

Trump is winning even after taking political napalm from Marco Rubio since last week’s debate – with Rubio ridiculing his rival on the trail for days.

Trump is winning despite the fact that the Republican speaker of the House and majority whip in the Senate both criticized him this week. He is winning in spite of the fact that almost every big name Republican officer-holder and mega-donor is lined up behind his opponents.

The race is not technically over. While Trump will win the lion’s share of delegates tonight, both Cruz and Rubio will pick up delegates and spend the next couple of weeks trying to convince voters and donors that they can stop the frontrunner – that they have a path to the nomination. Whether or not either of these men can really achieve that at this point – and I remain highly skeptical, despite Cruz’s two-state win – the day of reckoning for the Republican party has arrived. Whatever happens, what neither Cruz nor Rubio nor anyone else can do is to stop the forces that Trump’s candidacy has unleashed.

It’s no longer possible to say the Republican party is a conservative party. You can’t even say the Republican party’s base is conservative. It appears that a new, populist-nationalist wing has wrested control of the of the GOP away from its familiar constituency. This is no longer the party of William F Buckley and Jack Kemp. It’s now the party of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot.

Trump’s opponents have argued that he has run a campaign devoid of policy. That is simply not true: he’s taken plenty of policy positions. Unfortunately for traditional Republicans, almost every one of them is complete anathema to conservatives, from trade, to entitlement reform, to healthcare, to the power of the federal government. While Rubio and Cruz fight he battle to keep a hold on the party in the short term, they have already lost the war. The carpet bombing that the stop-Trump forces now believe is necessary to keep him from winning the nomination will only serve to widen and deepen the schism between the conservative and the populist-nationalist wings.

The Trump campaign and its stunning success represents a fundamental reordering of forces in the Republican party. If you are traditional, limited government conservative in the GOP, this Super Tuesdsay will truly have made you exclaim “the horror, the horror”.