They aren’t wrong, they’re just late. Perhaps they were thinking of a line attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Be with a leader when he is right, stay with him when he is still right, leave him when he is wrong.”

Good advice, but the trouble is that Trump was never right. He was wrong from day one, for the GOP and for the country. It’s a good thing so many Republicans are leaving him, but it’s too little, too late. With less than 30 days until the election, it doesn’t do much good now to declare that your nominee is a lecherous old misogynist who’s unfit for office.

Republicans should have done that back in July before their national convention, when it still had a principled ring to it. Now, it smacks of sheer opportunism. We didn’t learn anything new about Trump from that recording. All that’s changed is this: Republicans know they can’t win with this guy, and the only thing to do now is scramble for the lifeboats in a last-ditch effort to save themselves.

At the outset of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, I wrote that nominating Trump would mark the end of the GOP as we know it. With Trump at the top of the ticket, the party would be Republican in name only, and principled conservatives should either break with the GOP or immediately set about reforming it: “To do that, they need to purge the ranks of the emerging Trump GOP. All those who have thrown in their lot with an anti-free-trade, lifelong Democrat with no apparent understanding of the Constitution should not have a future in the party. Everyone who proved they were more interested in power than principle should be exiled.”