Donald Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP was evident again on Wednesday, as the party voted to eject Rep. Liz Cheney – a Trump critic – from its congressional leadership. On Thursday, a group of conservative standard bearers plan to push back.

Over 100 Republicans – including former elected officials – will issue a letter outlining an ultimatum: get rid of Trump or we’ll start a third political party.

More from Reuters, which broke the story:

The letter, headlined: “A Call For American Renewal,” is an exploratory move toward forming a breakaway party, two of its organizers said. The group is dismayed by what it says is a modern Republican Party driven by its allegiance to Trump, who continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from him. “The Republican Party is broken.

It’s time for a resistance of the ‘rationals’ against the ‘radicals,’” said Miles Taylor, one of the organizers. Taylor, while serving in the Trump White House, wrote an anonymous opinion piece in the New York Times in 2018 headlined: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

Taylor told The New York Times, “This is us saying that a group of more than 100 prominent Republicans think that the situation has gotten so dire with the Republican Party that it is now time to seriously consider whether an alternative might be the only option.”

JUST NOW: "If you can think about the existing GOP leadership as the dinosaurs, we're ready to be the asteroids."@MilesTaylorUSA on his efforts to split off a from the current GOP.
(But would not say any current office holders are joining the effort.)pic.twitter.com/oFDsdBflQU

— John Berman (@JohnBerman) May 12, 2021

The letter will call for a return to “principled” leadership and urge the GOP to reject division and conspiracy theories.

Signatories of the bill include: former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman; former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge; former Transportation Secretary Mary Peters; and former GOP Reps. Charlie Dent, Barbara Comstock, Reid Ribble and Mickey Edwards.

The Republican party has tied its future to Trump – they’ve advanced his conspiracy theories, echoed his rhetoric, and flocked to Mar-a-Lago for his advice. But Trump’s support among rank-and-file Republicans might be slipping. From a recent NBC News poll:

Even Trump’s pull within his own party appears to have lessened, with 44 percent of Republicans saying they’re more supporters of Trump than the GOP, versus 50 percent who say they’re more supporters of the GOP than the former president.