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Doesn't really matter. The word "conservative" has ceased to have a definitive meaning. Like "liberal" or "Christian" it means only what the speaker wants it to mean. Those other people are RINOs, or not true progressives, or not real Christians, etc.
The GOP is three different parties that no longer can fake as if they are coherent. There is the Tea Party which originally pretended to be about fiscal responsibility but really is a racist / populist / fascist movement, a "Southern Strategy" rebranding of Dixiecrats. There is the Evangelical Party, the social conservatives that want government goose-stepping all over your bedroom and doctor's office. Then there is the Establishment Party, the "one percenters" interested in maintaining the Wall Street / corporate status quo. This latter group is at least somewhat friendly and coherent with the libertarian sect, the intellectual conservative (National Review) sect and perhaps the Neocon / interventionist sect, as well as the career politician / DC insider sect.
These three GOP parties are currently represented by Trump, Cruz, and Kasich. Rubio wants to be all three but is so lightweight that he is none of the above.
These three GOP parties cannot coexist any longer. For decades, the Evangelical and Establishment parties successfully coexisted and manipulated the Tea Party rubes to vote along with them while giving the Tea Partiers nothing that was ever promised. That game is no longer working and is exploding in their faces.
None of these groups can win on its own as the appeal is too limited. They each can get perhaps a third of one half of the vote. Only by working together under some Faustian bargain can they continue to defeat their mutual enemy, the Democrats, but now it seems the schism is too great and the fascist Pandora is out of the box. The Establishment Party has far more in common with the Clintonites than it does with the Tea Party or even the Evangelical Party.
Perhaps they might one day form a centrist governing coalition while the fringe elements on the left and right snipe, but for now that can't happen because they've spent two decades vilifying "libtards" in general and Hillary Clinton in particular, not because they really believe the rhetoric but because that was the red meat used to feed the frothing rube class for so many years. To team up with the centrists at this point would be an admission of hypocrisy and duplicity.
For now they must maintain plausible deniability until the heat is off, just as the US government felt it had to spend decades sanctioning Cuba, decades after Cuba had any real relevance to US foreign policy and long after it became proven fact that sanctions would not achieve the original goal. It became a matter of continuing to pretend to hate Cuba meanwhile hoping that Castro would just die already. Once we got to the point that emerging senior citizens were born after the Cuban Missile Crisis (the last time Cuba was relevant) it became increasingly silly to maintain the facade of saber rattling.
So, maybe someday centrist-corporatists from both sides of the aisle will grow up enough to shake hands and work together instead of playing fire with fringer nutters.
I could definitely live with a future where the Rs schism, the progressive (Sanders/Warren) wing of the Ds eventually realize that with the Rs fractured they no longer need the Third Way (Clinton) wing and push them out, the Third Way joins up with the Establishment Rs (each of which have more in common with each other than with the rest of their current parties), and we end up with a left party I can believe in, a right party I may disagree with but can at least respect, and the lunatic fringe of bigots and proto-fascists that lined up behind Trump permanently marginalized as they should have already been for decades (if only the Rs had had the spine/integrity to say "we don't want you either" when they defected from the Ds in the wake of the civil rights movement).