Newswise — With the Associated Press calling the GOP presidential nomination for Donald Trump Thursday, the Republican Party establishment is coming to terms with what they once thought was unthinkable, a political scientist versed in the presidency said.

Daniel P. Franklin is an associate professor of political science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and is an expert on executive power, political culture, presidential legacies, and the relationships between the presidency and Congress. He is available for comment, and his contact information is in the contact box above, visible to registered and logged-in users of the Newswise system.

“There are five stages in the acceptance of loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance,” Franklin said. “The GOP is in stage four moving to stage five.

“With Donald Trump's virtual lock on the nomination, the Republican leadership will now come around,” he said. “They are probably telling themselves that Trump doesn't actually mean what he says.”

On the Democratic side, pundits who once stated that Sen. Bernie Sanders would drop out earlier in the race have been proven wrong, Franklin said.

“What started out as a ‘cakewalk’ is still a cakewalk, but nobody bothered to tell Bernie Sanders,” he said. “For better or for worse, Hillary Clinton has chosen to run from the center, but whether that center is the ‘right’ center remains to be seen.

“The calculation is that Americans will elect the most qualified candidate,” Franklin said. “Unfortunately that doesn’t always turn out to be true.”

Franklin is the author of “Pitiful Giants: Presidents in their Final Terms” (Palgrave MacMillian, 2014). It explores the approaches U.S. presidents elected to a second term after World War II have taken to executive actions, including Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama, during their final years in power.

Additionally, an updated edition of Franklin’s “Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Television and Movies” (Rowman & Littlefield) will be released later this summer, to include examinations of what films and television shows like American Sniper, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Twelve Years a Slave tell us about popular conceptions of government, the military, intelligence and terrorism, punishment and policing, and recognized mistakes in our shared history.

For more about Franklin, including his CV and a list of his other publications, visit http://politicalscience.gsu.edu/profile/daniel-p-franklin/.