Trump nixed his Patriot Party idea.
However, a history lesson is appropriate here - so I direct FR’s “third party” supporters to peruse the election of 1912:
On the Republican side was the incumbent - William Howard Taft.
On the Progressive Republican side was Teddy Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Party, who opposed Taft.
On the Progressive Democrat side was Woodrow Wilson.
And then there was the perennial socialist, Eugene Debs ...
We all know the outcome: Taft’s Republican Party and Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party split the ballot 23 - 27 percent (IIRC); socialist Eugene Debs took 6 percent, and Wilson won the presidency, taking 444 electoral votes with just 42 percent of the ballot. That led to the “progressive era” of Wilsonian liberalism, which, among other national disasters, led the U.S. into the futile endeavor that was WWI - which in turn set the stage for the rise of Hitler and WWII.
That is the reality of third party politics.
Our political system is a winner-take-all arrangement. We are not a parliamentary system; thus a third party would have no effective representation in Congress. We would neither be able to secure 270 electoral votes in a presidential election.
Why should we Republicans concede our party to the establishment hacks? We built it. They have all the contacts, all the e-mail lists, all the money WE raised for them, all the infrastructure. It ALL belongs to us, and we should not abandon any part to the RINOs and GOPe.
What we need to do is to fight them at every turn, and take the party back from these fools. Don’t run to a third party - that is a sure-fire way to lose every future election.