Republicans now have an ethical obligation to quit Trump's party

That statement says it all — but not in the way Graham intended.

Many Republicans have a big problem with white supremacists. They are controversial within the party!

Quite a few Republican officials are very upset about the president's statement that some of the torch-bearing marchers who chanted "Jews will not replace us" last Friday in Charlottesville, Virginia, are "very fine people." They really wish he would stop saying things like that.

Yes, the party has a pro-Nazi wing, which seems to include the president, and that's distressing, but Graham would like you to also remember there is a large anti-Nazi wing that shares your severe distress about the pro-Nazi wing!

If Lindsey Graham is so bothered, he should follow the business council CEOs out the door

I feel Sen. Graham's pain. I used to be a Republican, too. I did not enjoy watching the party become more and more embarrassing, and I did not enjoy watching the officials I liked repeatedly lose intraparty battles.

I think Graham's reaction is sincere, and his anguish about where Trump has taken his party is real. I swear my point in this column is not to make fun of him.

And Trump showed the crew of Pepe-avatar morons and hang-Hillary hotheads that they could take over the party if they wanted.

If Graham wants to stay a Republican senator, he's going to have to work with, for, and under these people. And this isn't just something that happened — it's the fault of establishment Republicans like Graham.

If the post-Bush GOP has often seemed to lack real policy ideas, a lot of the blame for that lies with George W. Bush, whose presidency was built on three big policy ideas that blew up in the party's face.

The first idea was the "ownership society": That the path to middle-class prosperity was a smaller government and more ownership of capital by ordinary people. In theory, Bush wanted people to rely more on private investment accounts for retirement, but the main way the ownership society manifested during his presidency was that people borrowed against home equity values they thought would keep rising rapidly forever.

This all ended very badly and nobody talks about the "ownership society" anymore.

After Bush skulked out of office, there were three kinds of Republicans left. There were Republicans like Sen. Graham with big, unpopular ideas, like waging more Iraq-style wars of intervention. There were Republicans with no real ideas besides opposing Barack Obama.

Trump had ideas about how he'd make middle-income people's lives better: trade and immigration restriction to protect them from competing with foreigners; aggressive policing to stop a supposed wave of crime and violence; "huge tax cuts" without cuts to entitlement programs; and a restoration of white people's concerns to the center of American politics.

The collapse of the healthcare-repeal bill demonstrated the party's lack of any ideological intentions even on the policy issue that dominated its campaigns for the past seven years.

When Obama was president, they attacked his signature law from the right or the left — whichever was convenient at the time. But when given the power to change the policy, they had no alternative of their own to implement.

There are Republican officials like Sen. Mike Lee who do have principled ideas about healthcare they would like to implement. But these ideas are very unpopular, and were never what most Republican voters cared about when they railed against "Obamacare."

Trump understood that rage against Obamacare was principally rage against Obama — not rage against government healthcare spending, which he promised to protect, or rage against the idea of government guarantees of insurance, which he promised to extend to everyone.

And he understood that this was also true on a variety of other issues. You don't have to be anti-government to win a Republican primary. You just have to promise to refocus the government on the grievances of white people, unlike the bad, black man who was spending all your money on "Obamaphones."

In the past 18 months, Romney has repeatedly criticized Trump in sharp terms. Romney never endorsed Trump for president, and I believe he is sincerely alarmed about what Trump has done to the party and the country.

But isn't it a little odd that Romney has never apologized for, or even acknowledged, his own role in elevating and validating Trump? Good people make mistakes; an admission by Romney that he had gone astray would make today's criticisms only more powerful.

I think a reason Romney won't do so is that, for successful Republican politicians, appealing to people with views on race like Trump's is part of the job. You can't win the election without them.

What horrifies people like Romney is not Trump and the Trumpists being in the party; it's them being in control of the party.

These Republicans want to revert to a situation where "normal" Republicans are in charge, but Trump and his base still feel included enough in the party to vote Republican. If retaking control of the party entails pushing Trump's people out entirely, the electoral math won't work anymore and Democrats will win.

So Romney can't apologize for the 2012 endorsement event because that was how things were supposed to work: Trump running his mouth so Romney can run the government.

In a way, the Republican Party is getting what it deserved for indulging its racist elements for so long. But there's no way of going back to how things used to be.

"Normal" Republicans can't displace Trump because they don't have an alternative to white grievance as a core message. And if the party is going to have white grievance as its core message, how can it be expected to gain distance from white supremacists?

If Graham can't bear to be associated with these people — if he can't be in a party that has its welcome mat out for the David Dukes of the world — then he'll have to stop being a Republican.

Republicans now have an ethical obligation to quit Trump's party

If Lindsey Graham is so bothered, he should follow the business council CEOs out the door

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