This is not going to happen, and it's not going to happen for the same reason that Donald RealityShow Trump is winning the Republican nomination in the first place: There is no "there" there, when it comes to the deep commitment to "traditional conservatism" that would be required to mount such an endeavor.
Around Washington, chatter about the possibility of an independent run by a traditional conservative is becoming louder.
All well and good, and backed up by very solid reasons why such a thing would be, in the long term, good for the Republican Party. It would be an explicit rejection of Trump's xenophobia, his vow for sweeping deportations and the banning of Muslims—or would it? It would be a vehicle for mocking Trump's pointless, know-nothing belligerence when it comes to the complexities of foreign policies—that is, if you could find someone who substantively disagreed. It could be the stage from which "traditional" conservatism rejected Trump's overt sexism and racism in favor of a policy-centric approach that included the voices of American women, and black Americans, and other minorities—and if you consider that a likely possibility than you haven't been paying the slightest attention to the last fifty years of conservatism, a movement still dedicated to an innate suspicion of all those unpleasant people.
A "traditional conservative" third party candidate would have policy prescriptions not appreciably different from anything Donald Trump has proposed; the "third party" candidate would, advocates instead hope, be able to say them out loud in less patently offensive ways. If anything the candidacy would be more extremist than what Trump has on offer: When Donald Trump proposed deporting all 11 million undocumented American residents post-haste, he included the _out_ that we could then let "the good ones" back in. For that he was pilloried at the time by the remaining Republican candidates—not for the mass deportations, but for the suggestion of undoing any of it afterwards. Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric is extraordinarily popular with the conservative base being courted: no third-party conservative would dare challenge it. And from John Kasich to Jeb Bush, a traditional conservative approach to issues of women's health, public discrimination, and the mechanisms by which one American's religion can restrict the rights held by other Americans is well established, extremist, and inviolate.
Donald Trump has been getting powerful spite from "traditional" social conservatives, who are unconvinced that Trump holds true commitment to dismantling abortion rights or prying states out from under the heel of federal anti discrimination protections. By traditional conservative do we mean someone who would step up and re-pledge the movement to such things? Or are we strictly talking about down-and-out other bits of conservatism, the ones who don't give a particular damn about any of that so long as there are tax cuts, and business tax cuts, and deregulation of whatever industries feel put out by pollution restrictions or worker protections on a given particular day?
Who is this third party run for? Is it strictly for the David Brooks and Bill Kristols of the world, a class of Republican elites who have long held that the Republican Party is above Trump's rank prejudices and absurd shouting at clouds, and is humiliated at having to eat their words? Is there some secret cabal of conservatives who find Trump's anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant rhetoric so offensive that they cannot bring themselves to support him? Where, pray tell me, is this massive upswelling of "true" conservative decency that would rather abandon hope of claiming the presidency than attach themselves to a Great Gilded Führer?
It has fucked off and left, that is where it is, and it has been gone for a decade. The party lost its mind when the black man was elected president, leading to years of searching for the "true" birth certificate that would prove him as illegitimate as they suspected he was—and it was Donald Trump who most visibly attached himself to that charge. For years the conservatives in charge of the government spent money like it was water—only to feign shock and outrage over the resulting deficits when the next administration rolled around. It not Donald Trump but the Republicans in the various states who have led the charge to restrict the rights of Muslims, and who first claimed that Mexico was "sending us" little else but drug dealers and rapists, and who pass law after law declaring themselves unbeholden to the American federal government when it comes to anything they feel particularly strongly about, and pass laws accepting or even enforcing public discrimination based on religious pronouncements, and who tell American women that the only method of birth control that they have a right to is putting "an aspirin between their knees", and who sue repeatedly in the courts to get out from the restrictions on changing their voting laws to discriminate against the poor and the non-white that were placed there after a century of fraud, and who after succeeding immediately write out new voting laws to do precisely the things protected against, and who consider science to be a conspiracy against the Almighty Oil Company, and who have steadily transitioned their entire movement from whatever it was before into little beyond but a series of regularly scheduled shouting matches on Fox News, a circus of flag-waving where the story of the day is that they are right and the other party is wrong and what the actual details of the positions are—if they are mentioned at all—has no bearing on what the movement thought last year, or last week, or will think tomorrow.
Traditional conservatism is Donald Trump. The yelling at clouds, the xenophobic outbursts, the self-same conspiracy theories that steadily work their way from internet lunatics to Donald Trump's retweets. Even the swimsuit competitions financed by the ratings-obsessed billionaire has analogue in the longtime de rigueur Fox News dress code for female anchors that results in election-eve pronouncements by producers to show us Megan Kelly's legs.
Here is what is going to happen next.
The Republican National Convention will take place, and Donald Trump will win on the first ballot. There will be no floor fight or attempt to strip the nomination from him via newly adopted rules or newly imposed requirements. Speaker after speaker will get up and praise the glories of the Republican Party with nary a whisper of doubt about their new leader.
Bill Kristol, who has been beside himself in his demands that the party stand up to Trump by mounting a third-party effort, will write a column rejecting the notion, then over time begin to write steadily why the man he loathes to his core is actually a damn fine conservative, worthy of your vote. Repeat for David Brooks, and for every other conservative thinker currently declaring themselves and their "intellectual" movement far above the rancid slitherings of a Donald Trump.
The National Review, which devoted an issue to declaring Donald Trump unfit to get anywhere near the presidency, will devote another issue to the reasons why they support him for exactly that position.
The Washington Post editorial board, which has so excoriated Trump on their pages that the pages were often left charred around the edges, will write columns about how the Donald Trump tax plan, whatever it turns out to be, is so manifestly better for America than the one proposed by the other party that Americans should grit their teeth and begrudgingly vote for the known incompetent.
The new Republican platform, espoused by Reince Priebus, and every conservative pundit, and every conservative outlet, and Fox News in specific, and by the various true conservatives in the Senate and in the House, will become whatever Donald Trump says it is. And when Donald Trump says something different the next day, as he so frequently does, it will become that too.
It is the very factors that led to the rise of Donald Trump that preclude anyone in the "movement" he has coopted from wrestling it back from him. Conservatism is, now, loud shouting. It is a rejection of unpleasant facts and a declaration that the messenger is part of a grander conspiracy against conservatism. It is reflexive opposition to government as "stupid" or "the problem", something to be belittled and dismantled and ransacked. It is the declaration that "China is raping our country", and the declaration that the black president is somehow illegitimate, and the fear of immigrants, and the inability to tell Muslim from Sikh, and the muttering that back in the day all of these unpleasant people knew their place because if they didn't they'd get their teeth knocked out as God and the Party intended.
Any movement to take back the party and return it to the supposed principled thinkers and rational voices that it should belong to must find a coalition of those supposed thinkers and voices to appeal to. That bloc doesn't exist. It didn't turn out for Jeb, or for Rick Perry, or for Marco Rubio, or for John Kasich, or even for the frothing and shouting Ted Cruz, himself very far to the right of anything that the party of George W. Bush would dare put onstage. It is dead, replaced by this walking, talking ball of pus and bile that America's most dedicated Republican voters put in its place.