It becomes plainer every day that a sizable majority of Republican voters want Donald Trump to be their nominee for the presidency.

Astonishingly, there are leading Republicans who would actually rather have another Democrat in the White House for at least another four years! (See here and here.)

Roger L Simon writes cogently at PJ Media:

I thought one of the first duties, if not the first duty, of a political party was to win. If you don’t win, everything else, every policy, every theory, every idea, is air.

That was until I joined the GOP.  … The attacks on Donald Trump by his fellow Republicans have been, to put it bluntly, waaaay out of proportion.  If – as Trump himself said in his press conference Tuesday after winning handily in Mississippi and Michigan – Mitt Romney had attacked Obama with half the vitriol he has attacked Donald Trump with, Romney would be president today.

And then there’s the conservative punditocracy, so many of whom seem to be suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome — or perhaps it’s Trump Envy (for which I wouldn’t blame them).

But I ask – as someone who would gladly vote for any Republican candidate still running and probably any of the thirteen who dropped out – what exactly do they find so terrible about Donald Trump?  … Maybe he isn’t the most conservative of conservatives (wasn’t John Roberts supposed to be that?), but he is clearly one of the more politically shrewd candidates to come along in a while – and not just for a non-politician.  Just the way he is turning post-primary victory speeches into quasi-press conferences, monopolizing the media, reinvents the game.

And he is expanding the Republican vote.

What most surprises me, however, is the approach taken to Trump by his enemies, those known under the rubric #NeverTrump and those better heeled who have blown millions on nauseating and evidently useless attack ads painting Donald as Mussolini … For a group of smart people, in some cases very smart, they seem to have skipped Psychology 101 in college, making them curiously oblivious to the blowback from their assaults. … (Personally, I find it hard to resist someone who finally spoke a truth at that press conference that the media seems deliberately to have ignored all year: “I don’t think there is such a thing as an establishment.” There isn’t – and who would want one?)

The best approach to someone like Trump, who is at heart a business pragmatist without rigid  ideological convictions (convictions that would make it extremely difficult for a businessman to function), is to … bring him over to your side, politically and ideologically. … He wants to make a deal and fairly invites co-optation.

Trump himself, in that press conference or whatever you want to call it (press-infomercial?), extended an olive branch of sorts to his opposition in the Republican Party at large.  They should take him up on it – at the same time urging him to reciprocate and keep it up on his end.  Start a mutual admiration society. …

The Trump Derangement Syndrome has got to go. …  We are headed to an epochal  general election and November is closer than it seems. Close your eyes and it’s here. The time to start dialing down the internecine warfare is now.