Anyone whom the MAGA base suspects of being a RINO is a dead armadillo now. The best advice I could offer Pence and Haley is to disappear. Since they can’t go back in time, and since swimming against the tide is (at best) treading water, the best thing they could do is wait for the world to change. But they’re still here, acting like no one will remember they were caught swimming naked when the tide rolls back in.

Why is it that everybody but Pence and Haley can see this? As Richard Feynman put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” It truly is the rare person who knows to quit when the quitting is good.

There’s a great story about how Jani Lane, the front man for the late ’80s glam metal band Warrant, realized in a split second his career was over. He walked into Columbia Records, saw an Alice In Chains poster over the secretary’s desk, and thought: “Hello Seattle, goodbye Warrant.” He wasn’t wrong. A year earlier, his band’s poster had adorned the wall. But times were changing, and grunge was ascendant. I think about this story whenever vanilla Republicans like Pence or Haley reemerge. The main difference between them and the “Cherry Pie” rocker is that they lack his realism and level of self-awareness.

While Pence and Haley might have been formidable Republican presidential candidates in, say, 2012, the party has moved on—whether they like it or not. Timing is everything in politics, as Chris Christie could tell you.