US Republicans face a series of grim decisions

Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination for president and Hussein Ibish argues this will leave a lasting mark on the party

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Costa Mesa, California. Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee. Last Tuesday he swept five primaries. Neither of his opponents can amass enough delegates to win without backroom chicanery. And he has finally reached the 50 per cent mark in national polls of likely Republican voters.

Mr Trump is closer to outright victory than most realise. Conventional wisdom holds that a Republican candidate needs 1,237 delegates, a mathematical majority, to win. But GOP party rules expert J Randolph Evans argues the real number is 80, not 100, per cent of the majority, which comes to about 1,100 delegates.

Mr Evans predicts a stampede of uncommitted delegates to any candidate who reaches the 80 per cent threshold since party “insiders want to remain insiders and the bandwagon effect always takes over”.

Mr Trump now has 996 delegates, and his main rival, Ted Cruz, a mere 565. He will easily secure the additional 104 required by Mr Evans’s persuasive analysis.

Republican leaders have therefore begun to reconcile themselves to the reality that Mr Trump will be their nominee – although they’re adopting a range of conclusions and responses.

The party establishment has been compelled to evaluate the political consequences of a concerted effort to deny Mr Trump the nomination if he can be prevented from securing 1,237 delegates. Many key insiders now feel that, disastrous though a Trump nomination will almost certainly be, a behind-the-scenes plot to unseat him if he falls just short of the magic number could be even more damaging, and possibly fatal, to the party.

The forthcoming Trump nomination is without doubt extraordinarily dangerous and perhaps catastrophic for Republican power at the national level.

His negative ratings are so high and his personality so toxic beyond his passionate, but distinctly minority, bloc of supporters that his leadership could undo Republican majorities in the Senate and even the House of Representatives, in a replay of the traumatic GOP rout of 2008.

Such a debacle is plausible only if Mr Trump becomes, in the eyes of most other Americans, an exceptionally repulsive face of the Republican Party.

Much of the GOP establishment has concluded that the party faces a grim binary. It can go down to a devastating defeat with Mr Trump, but live to fight another day. Or its leaders could try to stop him and provoke such outrage and incredulity from the Republican rank and file that the resulting backlash might actually destroy the party.

Therefore, many now think the safer course is, counterintuitively, to allow the Trump campaign to drag the party to a probable crushing defeat rather than try to nullify his primary victories. Hence insider efforts to bring down Mr Trump have been largely abandoned. The potential price is simply deemed too high.

But Republican leaders know their base has selected probably the worst, in every sense of the term, presidential nominee in modern American history. Mr Trump’s unprecedented and complete lack of political experience, evident policy ignorance, bigotry, misogyny, violent rhetoric, conspiracy theories, crude bluster and unmistakable narcissistic personality disorder make him distasteful beyond his base.

The percentage of Americans who view him unfavourably, which most polls measure in the upper 60s, is unheard of for a major candidate. Worse, his unpopularity rating has actually been steadily increasing. To be competitive in a general election, Mr Trump would have to radically transform his image. But he’s so well known and set in his ways that this seems implausible.

Many significant constituencies – including women, Latinos, African-Americans, Arab and Muslim Americans, and even many neoconservatives – will not only oppose Mr Trump, but also be energised by the threat he poses.

Hillary Clinton is, historically, an exceptionally unpopular candidate with “unfavourables” in the low 50s.

Yet most polls show her trouncing Mr Trump by 7 to 10 per cent. Undoubtedly many Republicans will reluctantly vote for her. Almost all Republican candidates in competitive elections have ostentatiously distanced themselves from Mr Trump. And he has received only a handful of endorsements from Republicans in Congress, while numerous party bigwigs have denounced him as a dangerous charlatan.

But the party base has overruled them, and the establishment now faces a set of unpalatable choices.

Three factions are already emerging.

The largest group will grit their teeth and support Mr Trump out of party loyalty, distaste for Democrats and, most of all, in hopes of power and patronage. New Jersey governor Chris Christie pioneered this latest incarnation of the world’s oldest profession.

The second will do as little as possible, try to stay home, keep a low profile, and go through pro forma motions.

The third, and unfortunately probably much the smallest, emerging Republican establishment faction will be those who have the self-respect, patriotism and common decency to openly oppose Mr Trump and what he stands for.

Only those principled Republican leaders who reject Trumpery – as it should certainly be called – will emerge with their reputations intact. It is they who will have to rebuild and repair the Republican Party once the Trump fiasco has, as it must and surely will, becomes a bizarre, though disturbing, historical footnote.

Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington

On Twitter: @ibishblog