A Breakaway Third Party of Ex-Republicans? Don’t Count on It.

The idea of a conservative anti-Trump party gained publicity this week — but the threat remains hollow.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln declared in 1858, just two years before he assumed the mantle of the recently formed Republican Party. “It will become all one thing or all the other.” A century and a half later, in the wake of a presidency driven by personality politics that ended with a violent assault on the Capitol building, the G.O.P.’s House conference is deeply divided against itself. The question is what it will become. A group of traditionalist Republican figures — virtually none of whom currently hold elected office — are threatening to ditch the party and start a new one, saying that the G.O.P. is on the verge of becoming “all one thing”: a cult of personality.