The NY Times on rich GOPer hand wringing:
On Labor Day, Eric Levine, a New York lawyer and Republican fund-raiser, sent an email to roughly 1,500 donors, politicians and friends.
“I refuse to accept the proposition that Donald Trump is the ‘inevitable’ Republican nominee for President,” he wrote. “His nomination would be a disaster for our party and our country.”
Many of the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors share that view, and the growing sense of urgency about the state of the G.O.P. presidential primary race. Mr. Trump’s grip on the party’s voters is as powerful as ever, with polls in Iowa and New Hampshire last month putting him at least 25 percentage points above his nearest rivals.
That has left major Republican donors — whose desires have increasingly diverged from those of conservative voters — grappling with the reality that the tens of millions of dollars they have spent to try to stop the former president, fearing he poses a mortal threat to their party and the country, may already be a sunk cost.
Interviews with more than a dozen Republican donors and their allies revealed hand-wringing, magical thinking, calls to arms and, for some, fatalism. Several of them did not want to be identified by name out of a fear of political repercussions or a desire to stay in the good graces of any eventual Republican nominee, including Mr. Trump.
“If things don’t change quickly, people are going to despair,” Mr. Levine said in an interview. He is among the optimists who believe Mr. Trump’s support is not as robust as the polls suggest and who see a quickly closing window to rally behind another candidate. In Mr. Levine’s 2,500-word Labor Day missive, he urged his readers to pick Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Other schools of thought exist. Some donors have backed Mr. Trump’s rivals despite believing that he is unbeatable in the primaries. These donors are banking, in part, on the chance that Mr. Trump will eventually drop out of the race because of his legal troubles, a health scare or some other personal or political calculation.
[…]
Privately, many donors said that the primary contest so far — especially the first Republican debate last month, in which Mr. Trump did not take part — had felt like a dress rehearsal for a play that would never happen. One donor’s political adviser called it “the kids’ table.”
One Texas-based Republican fund-raiser, who has not committed to a candidate and insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations, said he regularly told major donors that like it or not, Mr. Trump would be the nominee.
“Intellectually, their heads explode,” the fund-raiser said. He said many donors were “backing off” rather than supporting a candidate, reflecting a fundamental belief that nobody can defeat Mr. Trump.
Large-dollar Republican donors, even those who enthusiastically or reluctantly backed Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, have made no secret of their wish to move on in 2024.
They supported him in 2016 and 2020 and they expected that there would be no lasting consequences? That the GOP electorate Trump and the right wing media convinced that know-nothing transgressive politics were a winner would suddenly shove all the ugliness and corruption back under a rock and go back to pretending they weren’t a bunch of bigots and nihilists? Well, that didn’t happen, did it?
And I’m quite sure they will “reluctantly” support him again. Because they are no better. In fact, they are worse because they had the power to do something about this and they didn’t because in their minds anything was better than supporting a Democrat who might try to raise their taxes or regulate their businesses. They own this situation as much as vile Trump.