Of all the strange images of this strange campaign, I find myself particularly struck by this vision: Mitt Romney, pacing alone in one of his many houses, his angst evident in his faintly mussed-up hair, placing pleading phone calls to Republican politicians asking them to run as a third-party candidate against Donald Trump.
That bizarre, existential one-act play — “Conversations About Trump,” opening Off Broadway, with Josh Brolin as Romney and the voice of William H. Macy as John Kasich — is apparently where the quest for a conservative alternative to Trump and Hillary Clinton ran into a wall.
In the end, there isn’t going to be a convention walkout, the Republican Party isn’t going to fracture or go the way of the Whigs, and the elite constituency for a third-party run turned out to consist of a collection of pundits, a handful of strategists and the 2012 Republican nominee.
Which is why Romney made those calls in vain. When the idea was first kicked around months ago, the main case for a third-party candidate was that the G.O.P. could actually benefit institutionally from an independent anti-Trump campaign — that it would help rescue down-ballot Republicans by giving anti-Trump conservatives a reason to turn out, and it might even help save the Republican brand from being permanently tarnished, permanently Trumpified.
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