We may be witnessing the collapse of the Republican party, or at least the Republican party as we know it. And if so, then Donald Trump is the harbinger of its apocalypse.

The signs of the party’s weakness and disarray are everywhere. Trump is the GOP’s presidential front-runner by most any measure: FiveThirtyEight, which recently published a long essay looking at the GOP’s breakdown as a party, gives him a 55 percent of winning the nomination, based strictly on the polls. Yet the candidate is now in open warfare with two of the right’s most influential media platforms: National Review and Fox News.

Last week, National Review published a special issue devoted to denouncing the candidate, with an unsigned editorial labeling him a “a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.”