Get the hook. Donald Trump has just gone where no respectable presidential nominee has ever dared. And every Republican leader knows, deep down, there is now just one course of action that must be taken.

They must dump Trump.

House Speaker Paul Ryan now knows this, deep down. So does Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. Ever since Trump addressed a rally in Wilmington, N.C., Tuesday, these party leaders have had to feel the stab of moral reality deep down in the souls they still have but have so far been too politically fearful to heed.

Clearly and crudely, Trump carefully suggested — without flat-out saying it — that maybe it would be a good thing if someone shoots his Democratic presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Here's what Trump actually told his rally audience — including a last portion that has been cut and omitted from the soundbite snippets you have seen on your favorite news screens ever since. I'm adding it because I believe it makes Trump's context and intent disgustingly clear:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges — nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know.”

Most news accounts stopped their quotation here, but Trump went on to add this: “But — but I'll tell you what. That will be a horrible day — if, if Hillary gets to put her judges in.”

Trump, forever a master of the art of oratorical imprecision, knows well the potential — see also: diabolical — impact of what he carefully suggested without quite saying. He may well have succeeded in planting the seed of a suggestion with a nutcase who has access to a gun and has a mind that is easily bent, as to how he could help his favorite firearms cause.

The ugliness of Trump's suggestion is a reminder of how close we can be to revisiting a hellish era I have covered far too many times. I was still in school when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But I have covered the events following the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford, the assassination attempts that crippled presidential candidate George Wallace, severely wounded President Ronald Reagan, crippled of my friend and Reagan's press secretary, James Brady, and severely wounded the heroic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Trump and his campaign spokespinners say Trump was only referring to the great political clout of the National Rifle Association. I think that's a damnable lie.

As former CIA Director Michael Hayden so accurately noted, “If someone else had said that outside the hall, he'd be in the back of a police wagon now, with the Secret Service questioning him.”

Among the conservative Republicans who reacted and converted quickly was Joe Scarborough, who was elected to the U.S. House in 1994. In a Florida panhandle district that was widely considered to be among the most conservative in the nation. For years he was considered a bold and uncompromising conservative ally in then-Speaker Newt Gingrich's revolution.

Scarborough has since moved on to host MSNBC's “Morning Joe” — and Tuesday night Scarborough blogged for The Washington Post that the GOP must “dump Trump.”

“The GOP nominee was clearly suggesting that some of the 'Second Amendment people' among his supporters could kill his Democratic opponent were she to be elected,” Scarborough wrote.

Scarborough added: “Paul Ryan and every Republican leader should revoke their endorsement of Donald Trump ... A bloody line has been crossed that cannot be ignored. At long last, Donald Trump has left the Republican Party few options but to act decisively and get this political train wreck off the tracks before something terrible happens.”

Trump's reckless ways have proven his unfitness to govern. But oddly, the very transparency of his contemptible excesses have also given the best of this once-Grand Old Party one last chance to get it right.

Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.