Suffice to say that Trump will not leave Cleveland empty-handed. If the present palace intrigue against him succeeds and the nomination goes elsewhere without his acquiescence, he'll walk out and likely take at least several million angry GOP base voters with him. Then what would the party elite do?

It would probably be better for them long-term if they simply write this presidential election off, by giving Trump the nomination he earned at the polls, and then allowing those GOP candidates down ticket the opportunity to publicly repudiate him in an effort to save their own respective campaigns. Otherwise, the sort of Machiavellian machinations that would be required to dump Trump could literally tear the party asunder in Cleveland -- and on prime-time national television, no less.

Either way, we could be on the cusp of one of our country's periodic major political realignments, which last happened in the 1960s and '70s when Democrats finally kissed off their Dixiecrat wing and as LBJ effectively predicted, wrote off the South. How this will ultimately shake out ten years hence, I really have no idea.

But the Republican Party, as at least as we've come to know it since the advent of Ronald Reagan's conservative coalition in the aftermath of Watergate, clearly cannot persist in its present form. The so-called "Reagan Revolution," which was nothing more than a longstanding but ungainly political alliance of convenience between self-serving economic plutocrats and dogmatic social ultraconservatives, has perhaps finally run its course.