 This video player must be at least 300x168 pixels in order to operate.  To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 10.2.0 or greater is installed.

The other day I spied a high Republican official walking on the street and called out his name. He stopped, hit his smile app and exclaimed how glad he was to see me. “What are you going to do about Trump?” I asked. He paused and then uttered the dreaded word: unity. “We have to have unity,” he said. I got his message. He’s selling out.

In the coming weeks, Republicans everywhere will be seeking unity by embracing a front-runner. If that person is Trump, they will be ignoring his utter lack of qualifications for the presidency, his harebrained schemes for controlling migration, his knack for insulting billions of people at a time (Muslims, women, the handicapped), his gaudy womanizing past, his lying, his exaggerating, his enthusiasm for torture and his ingenious view of the Constitution as a lease that can be broken.

That paragraph, politically lethal if I were writing about someone else, encapsulates precisely why Trump is so hard to stop. He is, among other things, scandal-proof. At the moment, an army of journalists is scouring the land looking for whatever Trump has done that we might not yet know about. Trouble is, there is little that can be revealed. Call him a womanizer, and he shrugs. Say he lies, and he lies by saying he doesn’t. Confront him with the truth and, as he did by insisting on Muslim revelry in New Jersey following the Sept. 11 attacks , and he just perseveres. He cannot be shamed.

It’s trite to liken Trump to a Kardashian, but what they have in common is the determination to outlast our moral or political revulsion. Kim Kardashian hit the big time with a sex tape. Revolting? Yes. But forgotten? Mostly. What lingers is the name.

MIKE STONE/REUTERS They’ll come out of the woodwork

It is similar with Trump. The shock of his statements — calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” for instance — has worn off. The same with his insult to Megyn Kelly or his mocking of a handicapped New York Times reporter. All that is now “old news,” blanched of its repellent ugliness by time .

Bit by bit, Trump will accumulate more endorsements. They will use the same reasoning that Sen. Lindsey Graham did last month when he endorsed Ted Cruz, whom he hates — a higher purpose. In Graham’s case, it was to stop Trump. With others, it will be this thing called party unity, or stopping Hillary Clinton.

But what is the point of a party that attempts to unify around a candidate such as Donald Trump? What then does the party stand for? Does the GOP endorse anti-Muslim bigotry? Shall the party have a plank about Mexican rapists or the physical attributes of women? If Trump is its nominee, will the party endorse what are certain to be misogynist and personal attacks on Hillary Clinton?

Donald Trump's celebrity supporters View gallery

Trump’s message, we are incessantly told, is that the GOP has double-crossed its constituency with trade, immigration and just about anything else you can name. But it will do the Republican Party no good to win back the aggrieved at the cost of everyone else — not to mention what is good for the country.

A glance at Trump’s endorsees — check his web page — is an effective appetite suppressant. Imagine a Republican National Convention’s dais stocked with some of the people who have already endorsed Trump — not just the feckless Chris Christie or the bizarre Sarah Palin, but such figures as the disgraced football player Richie Incognito, Hulk Hogan and Teresa Giudice, from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” a fresh alumna of the federal prison system.

When I spotted that Republican official, I did not say what I initially wanted to. I wanted to say that we are taking names — “we” being the American people. We will remember who endorsed a man who took American politics lower than it has ever been . Party unity will not wash. The GOP is going to lose, the only question is how — with some honor, or craven and deservedly mocked by history.