At the very least they will just keep as silent as possible. No person that wants to have a future will openly oppose the nominee and, thus, effectively support a Democrat.
Come November #NeverTrump (as well as BernieOrBush) crowd will be very small.
Yes, because it's impossible for people who disagree with you to have principles.
I really think you guys are misreading the situation. “Doing the right thing” and “being courageous” are not the same thing. Sometimes you can have a principled reason to do something, and that something also happens to be in your own narrow self-interest.
Many of the Republicans opposing Trump see opposing him as being perfectly aligned with their own self interest. For starters, the majority of Republican politicians who have ruled out voting for him in November are former officials rather than current officials, so the only thing they have to worry about is their legacy. Romney cares about how history will remember him, which is why he opposes Trump. He doesn’t have to worry about “never being able to work again”, or whatever.
And even among those currently in office, virtually the entire party is falling all over itself providing cover for anyone who wants to oppose Trump to do so. Many of those people opposing Trump are doing so because they think it’s the politically smart thing to do. Trump is going to lose badly, so distancing themselves from him is, in many cases, the least bad option. As you may recall, McConnell and other Republican leaders have been encouraging Congressional Republicans to run against Trump if necessary, to the point of even running negative ads against him if they think it would help. McConnell and others are absolutely prepared to throw Trump under the bus:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-party.html?_r=0So no, I don’t think there are going to be “purges” of people who failed to support Trump. The reverse is probably more likely. The party will lose badly downballot, and the party failing to do more to distance itself from him will be blamed.
I’m fulling expecting that, if Trump is losing badly in October, one or more candidates in close races who’ve already endorsed him will revoke their endorsement, using Trump’s latest outrageous statement as an excuse. It’ll be a last desperate attempt to distance themselves from him. As I said in another thread, even party leaders like Paul Ryan might do something like that, in order to help salvage the party’s brand, though that’s probably a longshot.
