Establishment Republicans are pursuing a “reckless” chaos strategy to take down Donald Trump — not so much out of principle but old-fashioned snobbery, conservative journalist Tucker Carlson said Monday.

Carlson, founder of The Daily Caller, said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that there are legitimate, substantive objections to Trump. He said he sometimes finds Trump erratic. He pointed to Trump’s debate performance last week, for instance, when the real estate mogul flip-flopped on his original position on reducing the number of high-skilled workers entering the county on H-1B visas.

But he lambasted the effort to orchestrate a contested convention, led by Mitt Romney’s call on voters to cast strategic ballots based on who is the strongest non-Trump candidate in their state. He ridiculed Romney’s apparent belief that a divided party might turn to him to be its standard-bearer in November.

“That’s truly reckless,” he said. “I think Trump is reckless in a lot of ways. But that’s really reckless. I mean, basically, you’re just saying let’s scramble it so completely that, you know … let’s just hope for the best. That’s not a way to run a presidential primary process, or run anything, really.”

Much of the opposition to Trump among elitist Republicans is because they find him “socially embarrassing,” Carlson said.

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“They don’t want to have to be associated with the kind of people who like Trump,” he said. “It’s pure snobbishness, actually. It’s not principle … Among the people in D.C. who I know, it’s mostly this, like, ‘Oh, God, this revenge of Walmart people.’ I mean, that really is their view. And that’s not a legitimate view.”

In the end, Carlson said, many of those Republicans — some of whom complain that Trump is insufficiently conservative — will end up backing Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“When it gets right down to it, they just have more in common with her,” he said, arguing that Clinton and insider Republicans basically share the same worldview, with similar beliefs about trade, immigration, foreign policy and social issues. “And now they’re saying it … I’m just glad Trump has clarified the divisions here. I am. If he were to go away tomorrow, it still would have been a super useful exercise, because it has forced everybody to reveal who he really is.”