Conservatives Are Desperate to Pretend Donald Trump Never HappenedThey want him to drop out not just to protect the country, but to sweep him under the rug.In many ways, Donald Trump’s mesmerizing self-destruction last week seemed almost rehearsed, like a building implosion in human form. His fixation with settling the score against the Khan family was the primer charge, which triggered a series of connected explosives,...
The process unfolded too rapidly for Republicans to cycle through the stages of grief over one explosion before another went off. In the crude overlap of anger, bargaining, and denial that resulted, some anti-Trump conservatives clung to the hope that Trump would leave the campaign, either voluntarily or through public pressure, and the party could press ahead to November with a new and not altogether unhinged nominee.
