WASHINGTON Eight years after a credible effort to dump Donald Trump as their presidential nominee because of his vulgarity, Republicans today appear stuck with the newly convicted felon for November, with no realistic means of taking the nomination away from him at their convention next month, even if they wanted to.

There will be no move to, no mechanism for and no interest in removing Trump at the convention, said Richard Porter, a Republican National Committee member from Illinois.

To Fergus Cullen, a former RNC member as a onetime chair of the state party in New Hampshire, the key element of that analysis is no interest in.

The residents of Jonestown chose suicide rather than leave, he said, likening Trump to the infamous cult leader Jim Jones. He has a death grip on the RNC and the delegates. Even if polls showed him losing 65-35, they would choose to go down with him.

Trump campaign officials did not respond to HuffPost queries.

Republicans who vocally opposed the coup-attempting former president as the 2024 nominee often mentioned that his various criminal cases could put the party in the position of having a convicted felon at the top of the ticket on Nov. 5.

Not only has that warning come to pass, but there also is now the possibility that their nominee could even be staring down an actual jail sentence when RNC members and delegates meet in Milwaukee next month for the Republican National Convention.

The judge in Trumps New York criminal case, Juan Merchan, has scheduled sentencing for July 11, just four days before the convention begins, after a jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to hide a hush-money payment to a porn actor to prevent her story from hurting his 2016 campaign. Though Trump could receive probation as a first-time offender, his decision to go to trial rather than plead guilty and his continuing lack of remorse could result in a stretch behind bars, legal experts said, although Merchan is likely to allow him to remain free until his appeal of the May 30 verdict is decided.

But within the Republican National Committee, which, like other groups allied with Trump, has taken to calling all prosecutions against him politically motivated witch hunts, even the prospect of a nominee facing incarceration is not sparking any effort to depose him.

Even if there was such a movement, and I have not seen such, most all delegations are bound by state law on one or more ballots at this stage of the process, said Ohio RNC member Jim Dicke.

Most state parties and some state laws do, in fact, require that delegates at the national party convention vote for the candidate who won their state or congressional district, at least for the first ballot or two. Nevertheless, the Republican Party is a private entity that can change its own rules at it sees fit.

I suppose that the Convention Rules Committee could propose a new rule that would release all delegates, but that seems unlikely, Oscar Brock, an RNC member from Tennessee. The Trump campaign will have practical control of the Rules Committee.

After his election in 2016, Trump and his allies made sure that people personally loyal to Trump moved into party slots at the local, state and national levels. Similarly, grassroots-level Republicans attending the party convention this summer are overwhelmingly loyal to Trump.

The situation was almost exactly the opposite in 2016, after Trump unexpectedly defeated 16 more established Republican candidates for the nomination despite a background as a New York City developer and a reality TV game show host with no political experience.

Almost none of the 168 members of the Republican National Committee were personally loyal to Trump that year. Nor were a majority of convention delegates, most of whom were decades-long activists in Republican politics.