Evan McMullin sat at a conference table in his modest campaign headquarters here one morning last week, struggling to pick which high-profile Republican had most disappointed him this year.

“Can we just say ‘all of the above’?” he asked, prompting giggles from the aides scattered throughout the room.

In McMullin’s view, the Republican Party’s wide-scale surrender to Donald Trump in 2016 had produced too many pathetic failures to rank. “I mean… some of these people said Trump was a fraud and a con man.”

At this, Mindy Finn, a former Republican consultant now serving as McMullin’s running mate, chimed in from the other side of the table: “Some of them, Trump said their father was involved in killing JFK…”