https://archive.is/P1nyE
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/anti-trump-forces-contemplate-the-end-220953
>After a week of bruising losses, many Republicans are ready to give up the fight.
>With Donald Trump marching toward a nomination that few believed he could win, Republicans once bent on defeating him are now reassessing their efforts to stop him.
>Trump’s dazed and demoralized adversaries find themselves at a defining moment: After unloading millions of dollars in attack ads aimed at destroying the real estate mogul, after the party’s 2012 nominee delivered a no-holds barred speech targeting him, and after conservatives far and wide spoke out in unrelenting terms about how he could never be president, he’s more dominant than ever — with another rival vanquished, a massive delegate lead and his two remaining opponents looking increasingly like the next to go.
>While some Republicans insist on standing firm against the businessman, more and more are contending that it’s time to reach a point of acceptance — and that a drawn-out primary or convention battle could be worse.
>“I’m soul-searching right now,” said Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, who last year explored the possibility of launching an anti-Trump campaign. “There’s still a pathway to defeating him, but it’s getting harder to see that.”
>“We’re at a turning point,” conceded Randy Kendrick, wife of Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick and a major contributor to the stop-Trump effort. “It’s a fork in the road — a political fork.”
>Conservatives call for ‘unity ticket’ to stop Trump
>The talks about how to deal with Trump’s ascendance took on fresh urgency on Thursday. Some were intent on keeping up the fight. Prominent conservative activists gathered behind closed doors at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington, just a few blocks from the White House, to discuss how Trump could be defeated — even if it means waging a third-party campaign to run against him. The meeting drew around two dozen figures, including prominent activist Erick Erickson, conservative columnist Quin Hillyer, South Dakota businessman Bob Fischer and former George W. Bush adviser Bill Wichterman.
>As attendees filtered out of the conference, one said they had agreed that Trump could still be stopped — and that they would do whatever was necessary to make it happen.
>“The consensus was that we need a unity ticket of some sort, and we’ll let the candidates work out who the unity ticket is,” Hillyer told POLITICO, floating the possibility of an alliance between Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
>Others, however, appeared more resigned. At a posh resort in Palm Beach, Fla. — just minutes from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — many of the Republican Party’s biggest donors discussed whether to continue shelling out millions on an anti-Trump offensive that so far has done little, if anything, to halt his rise. Many of those gathered, including New York hedge-fund manager Paul Singer and members of the Chicago Cubs-owning Ricketts family, have been the primary funders of Our Principles, a super PAC that spent heavily to defeat Trump, plastering Florida and other states with TV ads that portrayed him as a heartless businessman. Several of the donors reiterated their hope that Cruz or Kasich could still somehow win, sources familiar with the gathering told POLITICO. But others indicated they would be open to supporting Trump in the general election.