What's the difference between a Trump "Republican" and a lemming?

Answer: Lemmings don't really commit mass suicide.

But bogus Republicans who support the man who hijacked the party and is the enemy of everything it ever stood for do.

First, they managed to get an ignorant, unqualified, unstable and boorish clown- the only one of the Republican candidates whom the polls clearly and consistently said could not defeat Hillary Clinton- nominated because expressing their anger was more important than winning. Then they blamed the consequences of their own stupidity on their fellow Republicans who love their country too much to support that walking disaster. And now, they're moving to make the blunder permanent and destroy the party for all time.

Reince Priebus, the Republican national chairman who has completely sold out to those who have taken a great political party hostage, is hinting that former GOP presidential candidates whose consciences will not permit them to endorse authoritarian sociopath Donald Trump should be barred from seeking the nomination in 2020.

Never mind that Priebus will be powerless to impose any such penalty; his own association the upcoming Trump disaster would result in his own ouster even if he were not already retiring. Never mind that it will be the very people he wants to penalize who will be running the party in a matter of months. Priebus seems oblivious to the fact that even if it were otherwise, further alienating those who cannot support Trump is likely to make their departure from the Republican camp permanent, and effectively end the GOP's status as a major American political party.

Yes, the Republican candidates did all sign a pledge to support the eventual nominee. But all of them assumed- falsely, as it turned out- that the eventual Republican nominee would be a Republican! Further, Priebus ignores the fact that Trump himself repudiated that pledge before winning the nomination! The Republican political site "Red State" put it very well:

The pledge, itself, is not worth the paper it was written on. Trump signed the pledge but later admitted that he would not honor the pledge if he didn’t win the nomination. Under normal circumstances, dealing with people of more honorable stock, that would automatically absolve any other candidate of any obligation.

But this is weasel-boy Priebus we’re talking about. “Honorable” doesn’t enter into the picture.

In his own statement repudiating the pledge, Trump whined that Priebus and the RNC were picking on him!

An aide to one of the several former candidates who refuse to endorse Trump,  Ohio Gov. John Kasich,  says that his boss "refuses to be bullied" and in essence told Priebus what he could do with his threats.

Good for the Kasich camp.

The entire idiotic incident simply underscores a point I feel very strongly about, and which I expect to be foolishly dismissed once Trump is safely defeated: the damage Donald Trump and his supporters have done to the Republican party cannot be undone simply by relegating it to the past and moving on. Yes, it's important that that the GOP be an inclusive party, and the incompatibility of Trump's candidacy with that imperative is one of the reasons why his nomination has crippled it so badly.

But the people Trump has attracted to the Republican party are in large measure- though probably not exclusively- bigots and haters, the ignorant, the intolerant, and the enemies of the party's heritage and most basic values. They have turned the Republican party into exactly what the Democrats have been slandering it as being for decades.

Trump and his movement are cancer. They cannot be a permanent part of the party. Their continued presence within it is a death sentence. Those who form the core of Trump's movement and persist in its views and agenda must be treated like cancer and surgically removed.

The Republican party must expel them, or at least neutralize them by removing them from any and all influence once Trump passes into political oblivion in a couple of months. As long as they remain, those who have been excluded by the prostitution of the party brought about by Trump and his supporters and enabled by people like Priebus will continue to be alienated from it- and deluded though the Trump people are about this fact, there are more of us than there are of them.

Even without the Trump aberration, the Republican party has enough drama ahead of it as the ideological purists continue their insane insistence that the way to attract the centrist voters who have voted Democratic in the last two elections is to become increasingly rigid, inflexible, and extreme, I personally refuse to share a party with them, either.  There comes a point in which one who butts heads with a brick wall has to concede defeat at the hands of the wall.

I have a feeling that my newfound status as an independent will be of long standing- unless, of course, the suicidal instincts of the Trump and Cruz wings of the party force the birth of a permanent new party of the Center Right for people like Jeb Bush and John Kasich and Lindsey Graham, in which case I will probably be among its founding members.

This is not to say that if such a party is not founded I exclude the possibility of voting for Cruz or somebody like him in 2020, though I will do so from outside a Republican party his supporters control. But the consequences of the upheaval Trump has brought about simply will not disappear along with Trump himself. The Republican coalition that elected Ronald Reagan and the Bushes simply no longer exists, and I personally have no interest in belonging to what seems likely to take its place.

And I am very far from being alone, I have jumped off the wagon, I have been pushed.