By Jason Zengerle
June 9, 2016, 1:58 pm ET
GQ.com

ou could almost forgive Donald Trump for thinking the hard part was over. Having laid waste to the supposedly formidable Republican establishment in the primaries, he assumed he could count on a unified GOP to back him. And sure enough, the Republican rank-and-file seemed to be falling in line, "rallying behind Trump as if he were any other nominee," polling analyst Harry Enten recently noted. So too, were the GOP mandarins: Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, even Paul Ryan all began to biting their tongues and signaling their support in the last week. Their motives were clear: As the unsurpassably cynical McConnell put it when asked how the "Party of Lincoln" could defend a racist candidate, "I think the party of Lincoln wants to win the White House."

But this week, in the face of Trump's continued racist attacks on the judge overseeing the Trump University case, his GOP establishment support began to crumble. Some, like Ryan and Rubio, began tiptoeing away; and Illinois Senator Mark Kirk—who's in a tough reelection campaign— rescinded his endorsement of Trump entirely. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the few elected Republicans who's refused all along to board the Trump Train, predicted there would be more defections, telling the New York Times, "There'll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary."

To make matters worse for Trump, just as the exodus from him gains speed, the Democrats' biggest guns are coalescing behind Hillary. Granted, they were pretty much with her all along in her fight against Bernie Sanders. But now that she's cinched the nomination, they can be even more forthright about it. Indeed, for all the recent worry about Hillary's prospects against a candidate like Trump, there hasn't been much talk about one of her biggest strengths: The team that's now coming to pitch in. Unlike Trump—who's the definition of a one-man team—Hillary Clinton calls to mind Andre the Giant. She has a posse.

For starters, she's got Bill Clinton, who—as I've reported—is gearing up to play a much more prominent and aggressive role against Trump than he did against Sanders. Even if the Big Dog's lost a step or two, he's still an extremely popular (and often effective) campaigner and it's easy to imagine him rising to the challenge on the big stage, much as he did in 2012 when he delivered a crucial convention speech for Obama.

Continued at GQ.com