In the new Coen brothers comedy “Hail, Caesar!” Hollywood star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney, is kidnapped by a communist group and then suffers a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. After he’s released, he complains to his boss, production chief Eddie Mannix, about the exploitative nature of capitalism until Mannix, played by Josh Brolin, responds by repeatedly striking his face and yelling at him to get back to work.

This is approximately the role Mitt Romney tried to reprise on Thursday when he verbally slapped a Republican Party that, in the view of Romney and other GOP leaders, has been kidnapped by Donald Trump. If it were only so easy. Romney and the rest of the GOP establishment may be aghast at the heresies the minions are soaking up, but they themselves are culpable for much of the upheaval in the party. Who sought the benison of Trump other than Romney during the 2012 campaign? Who winked at the birth of birtherism? (“No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate,” Romney told a cheering crowd during the 2012 campaign. “They know that this is the place that I was born and raised.”)

Romney is thus firing the first official shot of the Republican civil war at Fort Trumpter, and hostilities are fully underway. On Wednesday night, 60 Republican foreign policy mavens issued an open letter declaring that Trump would “make American less safe” and “diminish our standing in the world.” Meanwhile, Trump is gaining other supporters. When he appears to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, it will likely be to a record and rapturous crowd.