As Nikki Haley stubbornly clings to life ahead of Super Tuesday, warning that nominating Donald Trump for president a third time would mean “suicide for our country,” some of her closest supporters take solace in the fact that the future is unknowable.

In the afternoon, at the grassroots Conservative Political Action Conference, Donald Trump called himself a “political dissident,” but by the evening, in South Carolina, surrounded by that state’s powerbrokers, the former president spoke openly of his ongoing efforts to rebuild the party’s national apparatus in his image.

While former President Trump complains that a cabal of Democratic donors, Wall Street investors, and other elites are supporting Nikki Haley in efforts to deny him a third Republican nomination, some of his own wealthy backers roughly fit that same description.

He could not scold Republicans into making him their champion, and so, after six months as a candidate, Chris Christie suspended his campaign in New Hampshire, but not before delivering one last lecture about democracy and the dangers of the GOP front runner, his old friend, Donald Trump.