Pity Donald Trump if you will. Just over a month after he announced he’s running again for the White House, his campaign appears to be coming off the rails.

Last week’s results from Georgia – where his hand-picked, deeply flawed candidate crashed to defeat – confirms his baleful impact on the Republican party’s performance in the mid-term elections.

While he’s by no means washed up, Trump’s poll ratings are sinking, just as his legal difficulties are mounting.

And – on top of it all – the former president last month inexplicably found himself having dinner with Kanye West, and fellow antisemite Nick Fuentes.

In the storm which followed, Trump resisted pressure from his staff to condemn Fuentes, reportedly fearful of alienating the racist section of his base.

Instead, last Friday Trump lashed out at “Jewish leaders”, saying they should be “ashamed of themselves” for their lack of “loyalty” after all he’d supposedly done for Israel.

Trump’s choice of dinner guests forced the normally quiescent Republican party to muster a whimper of condemnation.

Even some Jewish Republicans who have stuck by Trump through thick and thin finally drew a line in the sand.

Nonetheless, the reaction of Kevin McCarthy, who in January will become the new Speaker of the House of Representatives,  indicates that the Republicans remain cowed by the former president. The California congressman belatedly attempted to distance the party from West and Fuentes while avoiding directly criticising Trump.

But the Republicans’ apparent surprise at the company Trump keeps is largely synthetic.

Trump has been dog-whistling to antisemites for a very long time. And the Republicans simply can’t pretend they’ve only just noticed.

Remember, for instance, that this was a man who, shortly before the 2016 Republican convention, Tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton alongside a pile of cash and a six-pointed star.

Candidate Trump also ignored requests from the Anti-Defamation League to drop his campaign slogan – America First – which, it reminded him, carried “undercurrents of anti-Semitism and bigotry” thanks to its use by pre-war Nazi sympathisers such as Charles Lindbergh. Instead, he made the slogan the centrepiece of his inaugural address.

And Trump closed his 2016 campaign railing against “global special interests” – one speech, suggested journalist Ron Kampeas, featured “a curious replay of themes and language familiar to those of us who are steeped in monitoring antisemitism” – and running an attack ad featuring three prominent Jews: the chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.

So the Republicans have long known who Trump is. Long before he refused to condemn those “very fine” neo-Nazis who marched through Charlottesville in 2017 bellowing “the Jews will not replace us”; long before his White House issued a Holocaust Day Remembrance Day statement that failed to mention Jews; and long before he accused Jews who vote for the Democrats of “great disloyalty”, while referring to Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister” when addressing Jewish Republicans.

There’s no great mystery as to why Trump behaves this way. In February 2016, he responded to pressure to disavow David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who had recently endorsed him, by reportedly suggesting: “A lot of these people vote.”

And he’s not wrong. A poll of American voters earlier this month confirmed once again that Trump supporters are more likely to believe anti-white racism is a problem than antisemitism or racism against black people.

Principled conservatives – including many Jewish conservatives – recognised the danger posed by Trump from the start. “He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews,” wrote commentator James Kirchick six months before Trump was first elected in 2016.

But with a few honourable exceptions, Republican leaders have gone along with all this – and much more – because it was in their political self-interest to do so.

Much as they despised him behind closed doors, Trump delivered the tax cuts they’re obsessed by and the reshaping of the American judiciary they craved.

If they’re turning off Trump now, it’s for one reason: the former president’s a loser and a liability who’s repeatedly led the Republican party down an electoral blind alley over the past four years. As Texas Republican senator John Cornyn, once described as an "immutable Trump ally", put it last week: “Even if you capture all the Trump voters, you may be able to win a primary, but you’re not necessarily going to win a general election.”

But if – and it’s still a big if – the curtain is coming down on the final act of the Trump circus, the Republican party can’t be allowed to simply forget its role as chief appeaser and cheerleader. As the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote last week: “The bigotries Trump has unleashed are not spent and cannot be ignored. And they won’t be defeated until they are unequivocally denounced by whatever is left of honourable conservatism.”

There is, of course, a potential model for the Republicans to follow: our own Labour party, whose parliamentarians – again, with a few honourable exceptions similarly appeased and cheerled for Jeremy Corbyn for four long years. 

Corbyn’s crushing defeat three years ago this week forced Labour to change course.

The party has – initially tentatively, now more confidently – begun to reckon with its past and clear out its Augean stable of antisemites and their apologists.

If they’re truly to be rid of Trump, the Republicans need to cut out the mealy-mouthed condemnations and apologise for the former president’s actions. 

And they need a leader unsullied by having compromised with Trump and Trumpism in the past, a principled politician who would have no truck with a dangerous populist.

In short, the Republicans need to find themselves a Wes Streeting.