It’s looking more and more like Donald Trump is the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton.

He’s definitely the strangest.

With his fits of pique, spasms of ignorance and flashes of demagogy, he has turned the G.O.P.’s favorite bogeywoman into its summer crush. I haven’t seen a love story this unlikely since “Harold and Maude.”

Dozens of prominent Republicans have come out and said that they’ll vote for her or consider it, including, just last week, the Silicon Valley titan Meg Whitman, the Jeb Bush confidante Sally Bradshaw, and Maria Comella, a former spokeswoman for two of Trump’s most pugnacious promoters, Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani.

You can expect that list to grow. The Clinton campaign clearly does. As Bloomberg Politics and The Washington Post reported last week, Clinton’s aides have gone so far as to set up something of a special operation — a defection watch — to monitor news accounts and any other public hints that a Republican leader is thinking of renouncing Trump, so that someone on Team Clinton can reach out and ask him or her to take the next step. The Times’s Jonathan Martin revealed that Clinton herself called Whitman a month ago.