Is this the end of the Republicans?

The day the Republican Party ruptured

Growing resistance to a dominating Trump could splinter the GOP beyond repair.

By Eli Stokols

Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday sweep propelled him ever closer to the GOP presidential nomination — and pushed the party he seeks to lead to the breaking point.

The Manhattan billionaire, boosted by support from disaffected blue-collar voters, relished his Super Tuesday victories beneath giant chandeliers inside a Versailles-inspired ballroom at his own Mar-a-Lago resort. Trump had just razed Ted Cruz’s Southern firewall and left Marco Rubio gasping as Chris Christie, the former alpha male he’s turned into his own obsequious warm-up act, introduced his former rival as “Mr. Trump.”

It was just the latest surreal moment in a stranger-than-fiction election cycle—and vivid proof that the Republican Party as we’ve known it for decades, a party controlled by an enclave of country clubbers and an East Coast establishment, is no more.

With every victory, Trump is splintering the party, evoking strong emotions from an increasingly outspoken group of detractors and from the rank-and-file voters propelling his candidacy and rendering the GOP’s Washington power brokers powerless.

“We have expanded the Republican Party,” Trump said Tuesday night, noting the spike in turnout across this year’s GOP primaries. “I am a unifier. I know people will find it hard to believe, but I’m a unifier.”

“The Republican Party has become more dynamic, more diverse,” he continued. “We’re taking from the Democrats, we’re taking from the independents. We have a lot more people.”

As usual, Trump’s words contained more than a grain of indisputable truth. But it’s his other words—the schoolyard insults and crude New York City vernacular that masks a lack of knowledge about policy, the xenophobic dog whistles so loud they sound like a bark, the attacks on Republican elders, moderation on Planned Parenthood, even neutrality in the Israel-Palestine conflict—that so many Republicans cannot abide. As they dig in against his candidacy, they are girding for a civil war not, they insist, in order to cling to power over the party but to save the ideas and principles that have always held it together.

It is a war the GOP as we know it may not survive, “a big and strong fight going on about the future of the Republican Party as intense as we’ve ever seen,” said Pete Wehner, a veteran of the George W. Bush White House who has savaged Trump of late. “A Trump victory would be catastrophic to the Republican Party and a terrible danger to the republic itself. If he wins the presidency, you may see the efforts to form a new party.”

The disconnect between the Republican establishment and its donor class and the party’s grassroots base has been widening for years, ever since Barack Obama took office in 2009. But the increasing likelihood of Trump becoming the GOP standard-bearer is tearing whatever fraying threads had held this fractious coalition together.

As Trump racks up wins, his party is splitting into two factions with immeasurable distance between them—the #NeverTrump crowd on one side and the Make America Great Again movement on the other.

Following his huge win in Nevada’s caucuses last week, the first members of Congress got behind him. Days later, Trump unrolled the shocking endorsement from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a figure of the GOP establishment, and then Sen. Jeff Sessions, a darling of the party’s activist base—signaling growing acceptance by Republicans across the conservative spectrum that Trump is becoming the party’s new figurehead.

But a group of high-ranking Republicans, who dismissed Trump’s viability for nearly a year, are suddenly digging in against him, talking of third party candidates and a floor fight at July’s RNC convention as their last chance to stave Trump off. Rick Wilson, a GOP consultant in Florida supporting Rubio, compared the Trump-backers in his party to the French who accommodated the Nazis during World War Two, blasting “Vichy Republicans” for supporting someone he called “a hideous cancer on American political life.”

“I don’t remember anything like this in my lifetime of effectively 30 years in Republican Party politics,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP operative in Washington. “People don’t know what to do. They call me in tears and say, ‘I can’t vote for him because he’s a liar, a cheat and a racist and yet everything I’ve ever cared for in politics is on the line and could be lost if I don’t vote for him.’”

“It’s an impossible choice.”

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the GOP’s last presidential ticket, have ratcheted up their criticism of Trump. New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, chairwoman of the Republican Governors Association, couldn’t say Tuesday night if she’d support Trump as her party’s nominee. And several GOP members of Congress are going further than that.

“I cannot support Donald Trump,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse wrote in a long Facebook post Saturday night. “If Donald Trump ends up as the GOP nominee, conservatives will need to find a third option.” At least four House members have followed suit, stating publicly they will not support Trump no matter what.

While American history is replete with presidential nominees who’ve been less than welcomed by their party’s power brokers, never in recent memory have so many prominent politicians vowed not to support a candidate who’s increasingly a lock to top their ticket.

“There is someone now leading the pack who could destroy the party and lose an election that should be ours,” said former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman.

But the establishment clearly waited too long for its collective freak out. Trump had won three of the first four nominating contests before Republicans finally washed away months of magical thinking that the political newcomer who’s led the polls since the summer would somehow collapse on his own. The Republican donor class, after pouring more than $100 million into Jeb Bush’s super PAC, is redoubling its efforts to halt Trump, deciding this week to beef up the operations of Our Principles PAC, which was created in January to attack Trump.

Tim Miller, who’d served as Bush’s campaign communications director, just joined that effort. On Tuesday morning, he penned a message to his friends on Facebook: asking those living in Super Tuesday states, “Please for the love of God go vote in the Republican primary against Trump.”

But by evening, Trump was racking up victories across the South, the region that’s been the party’s backbone. While Ted Cruz won his home state of Texas, Marco Rubio’s disappointing night—he appeared to be shut out until notching his first win in Minnesota late—leaves the GOP establishment without a strong standard-bearer. But the Florida senator, perhaps the last hope of the establishment, vowed not to quit the race.

“No one is going to call for us to get behind [Trump],” Rubio said. “They know that the nomination of Donald Trump means the end of the modern conservative movement and the modern Republican Party in a very devastating way.”