So with Trump going down, why don’t his supporters abandon him to save the resistance to Hillary?

There are two reasons. First, they’ve been told that Trump still has a fighting chance if everyone just pulls their oars. Talk-radio hosts on Monday spent the day lauding Donald Trump for a strong debate performance, ignoring the poll numbers that show Trump in freefall and Congress now up for grabs. “Now that Trump is finally attacking Hillary,” conservative media figures say, “we can finally win this thing. All that’s required is for those stubborn Never Trumpers to jump aboard, and we can still pull it out!”
This is, to put it mildly, patent nonsense. The Trump Hindenburg is already on fire, and adding passengers isn’t going to slow the conflagration. It’s just going to ensure more destruction.

But that’s okay, according to many Trump supporters. That’s because they’ve also been told that congressional Republicans are irrelevant when it comes to stymying Democrats — so the only reason congressional Republicans must be abandoning Trump is out of some sort of bizarre sympathy for the Hillary agenda. For Trump, therefore, the party might as well be burned to the ground. After all, it wasn’t worth much to him anyway.

This is the perspective of key members of the Trump campaign including Steve Bannon, who once told Ronald Radosh, “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” According to Radosh, this included the Republican party and the traditional conservative media. This mentality has bled down to some Republican thought-leaders, who maintain that a Congress run by Paul Ryan is no better than one run by Nancy Pelosi — so if Ryan and Republican representatives supporting Trump increases Trump’s shot of winning by 5 percent but decreases Republicans’ shot of maintaining Congress by 40 percent, that’s a fine tradeoff.