http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/us/politics/republican-party-unravels-over-donald-trumps-takeover.html?_r=0By PATRICK HEALY and JONATHAN MARTIN MAY 7, 2016
By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major political parties.
But for leading Republicans, the dismay is deeper and darker. They fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism, with roots as old as the republic, that has not flared up so intensely since the original America First movement before Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Trump now feels so empowered that he does not think he needs the political support of the party establishment to defeat the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. He is confident that his appeal will be broad and deep enough among voters of all stripes that he could win battleground states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania without the support of leaders like Mr. Ryan, Mr. Trump said in an interview on Saturday.
For 12 consecutive years, polls have indicated that Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, and Republicans have been especially vulnerable to a political campaign like Mr. Trump’s that seeks to channel voter anger. In every state where the question was asked in exit polls during the primary season,
50 percent or more of Republicans said they felt betrayed by their leaders.
