...and have only themselves to blame for Trump, are too compromised to repudiate Trump, and will soon be rallying around Trump. Great long read from Frank Rich at New York Magazine:

The fiction that Trump’s exploitation of racial resentments is a shocking breach of Republican values has been fiercely asserted by Romney, Ryan, and the rest of the GOP Establishment for the obvious reason: A nearly all-white party, staring down the barrel of a looming minority-white America, can’t compete in national elections unless it can claim to have retained its founding identity as the party of Lincoln. That’s why there have been so many recent revisionist histories in conservative publications (not to mention a book by Joe Scarborough) attempting to sanitize the racial animus of the Goldwater-Nixon “Southern strategy” of a half-century ago. As voters went to the polls on Super Tuesday, March 1, Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist at the Journal who loathes Trump, captured the Establishment’s panic that Trump might now be sabotaging that elaborate airbrushing effort. “It would be terrible to think the left was right about the right all these years,” he wrote, and to discover that its “tendentious” accusations of “racial prejudice” were validated by Trump’s success among the Republican electorate of 2016.

One doesn’t need tendentiousness to make the accusation that some modern Republican leaders — and not just notorious southern racists of the Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms ilk but the Establishment’s very own centurions — have courted, and still court, bigots much as Trump does. The facts speak for themselves.

Rich goes on to unpack the facts at length. The whole piece is genius—hilarious and terrifying in equal measures—and you should go read it.