The many Republicans who detest Donald Trump sat on their hands for months, confident that his candidacy would implode. Now they face a grim question: will it instead be their party that is destroyed?
Mr Trump has blindsided the establishment with his appeals to voters’ resentments and frustrations. After romping through Super Tuesday he threatens to split the party in two.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have begun to say that they could not vote for him in a general election as a matter of conscience. Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has come very close to saying that Mr Trump is unfit to be associated with the party of Abraham Lincoln.
What could a split look like?
On one side you might have Mr Trump with a mob of followers motivated by nativist anger and protectionist trade policies, plus associated opportunists. On the other you could have a clique in the mould of the first President Bush: moderate conservatives with a sense of decorum and entitlement.
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The Republicans have been through ruptures before. In 1964 a conservative faction led by Barry Goldwater seized power. He was an abysmal presidential nominee, losing in a landslide to Lyndon B Johnson — but he paved the way for Ronald Reagan.
Some pundits hear echoes of another period: the disintegration of the Whig party in the 1850s, which gave rise to the Republicans.
For many, the disarray must sting all the more because the Democrats appear to be smoothing a path for Hillary Clinton to secure their nomination without too much drama. As The New York Times put it: “Democrats are falling in line. Republicans are falling apart.”
The crisis has escalated because traditional power mechanisms have disintegrated. In an age of billionaire donors the Republican National Committee was struggling to prove its relevancy even before Mr Trump announced his candidacy. It believes that it will be able to control the tycoon because he will need its voter database and other infrastructure if he is to contest the general election. To many that seems delusional.
Likewise, traditional media outlets have not been able to write a script for the tycoon: he uses Twitter to skirt them and he continues to benefit from a splintered field.
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The most realistic option Mr Trump’s rivals have may be to block him from winning the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, and then to gang up on him at the Republican convention in July.
That would be a messy, chaotic and undemocratic process, the kind of event that really could throw the party into an existential crisis.
In other words Mr Trump seems to be holding all the cards. Whether he planned it like this we’ll never know but he’s following a business credo he committed to paper 30 years ago in his memoir The Art of The Deal. “The best thing you can do is deal from strength,” he wrote. “And leverage is the biggest strength you have. Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs. Or best of all, simply can’t do without.”
With that in mind his call for the party to unify under his leadership sounded more like a threat than a plea.