Joe Biden seems like he’s running again, God love him.

He will most likely make this official in the next couple of months, and with the support of nearly every elected Democrat in range of a microphone. That is how things are typically done in Washington: The White House shall make you primary-proof. The gods of groupthink have decreed as much.

Unless some freethinking Democrat comes along and chooses to ignore the groupthink.

In private, of course, many elected Democrats say Biden is too old to run again and that they wish he’d step away—which aligns with what large majorities of Democrats and independents have been telling pollsters for months. The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision.

Yes, this would be a radical move, and would anger a bunch of Democrats inside the various power terrariums of D.C., starting with the biggest one of all, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There would be immediate blowback from donors, the Democratic National Committee, and other party institutions. But do it anyway. Preferably before Biden makes his final decision, while there’s an opening. If approached deftly, the gambit could benefit the president, the party, and even the challenger’s own standing, win or lose.

[David A. Graham: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]

There has to  be one good Challenger X out there from the party’s supposed “deep bench,” right? Someone who is compelling, formidable, and younger than, say, 65. Someone who is not Marianne Williamson. Someone who would be unfailingly gracious to Biden and reverential of his career—even while trying to end it.

Before we start tossing out names, let’s establish a big to be sure. To be sure, primaries can be very bad for presidents seeking reelection. There is good reason no incumbent has been subjected to a serious intraparty challenge in more than three decades—not since the Republican Pat Buchanan launched a populist incursion against President George H. W. Bush in 1992. A dozen years earlier, President Jimmy Carter had endured an acrid primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy. Both Carter and Bush managed to hold off their challengers, but they came away battered and wound up losing their general elections.

Biden, however, is a special case, for two reasons. The first concerns the disconnect between how affectionately most Democrats view him versus their desire to move on from him. Recent surveys show that 60 percent of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. These spigots of cold water in the polls have been accompanied by icy buckets of liberal commentary and chilly assessments from (mostly) anonymous elected Democrats in the press. By contrast, large majorities of Republicans wanted Donald Trump to seek reelection in 2020, and an overwhelming consensus of Democrats wanted Barack Obama to run again in 2012. Same with Republicans and George W. Bush in 2004, and Democrats and Bill Clinton in 1996.

Why should Biden not enjoy the same coronation? He’s done a good job in the eyes of the people who voted for him in 2020. His party overperformed in the midterms. He seems to be humming along fine—feisty State of the Union here, muscular visit to Ukraine there, and endless jokers to the right. He has achieved important things, has clearly enjoyed the gig, and appears quite eager for more. The difference in Biden’s case, of course, goes directly to the second reason for his special predicament. It begins with an 8.

Allow me to point out, as if you don’t already know this, that Biden is old. He is 80 now, will be 82 on Inauguration Day 2025, and will hit 86 if he makes it all the way through a second term. He was born during the Roosevelt administration (Franklin, not Teddy, but still).

The Delaware Corvette has flipped through the odometer a time or two. I’ve pointed this out before, in this publication. The White House did not like that story. But it was true then, and it’s truer now—by eight months, and a lot more Democrats are getting a lot more anxious.

“This is not a knock on Joe Biden, just a wish for competition,” says Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, one of a tiny number of elected Democrats who have expressed on-the-record trepidation about Biden’s plans. Phillips couches the absurdity of this in terms of free enterprise. “In the business world, if the dominant brand in a category had favorability ratings like the current president does, you would see a number of established brands jump into that category,” Phillips told me. “Believe me, there are literally hundreds in Congress who would say the same thing,” he said. “But they simply won’t fucking say a word.”

[Read: Why Biden shouldn’t run in 2024]

Here’s the deal, as Biden would say. No one wants to be accused of messing around with established practices when the alternative—very possibly Donald Trump—is so terrifying. But just as Trump has intimidated so many Republicans into submission, he also has paralyzed Democrats into extreme risk aversion. This has fostered an unhealthy capitulation to musty assumptions. And if you believe groupthink can’t be horribly wrong, I’ve got some weapons of mass destruction to show you in Iraq, not to mention a Black man who will never be elected president and, for that matter, a reality-TV star who won’t either.

The big riddle is: Who? Let’s assess an (extremely) hypothetical primary field. First, eliminate Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, and any other member of Biden’s administration from consideration. Such an uprising against the boss would represent an irreparably disloyal and unseemly act and simply would not happen. Let’s also eliminate Senator Bernie Sanders from consideration, because been there, done that (twice), and he’s actually Biden’s senior by a year.

Otherwise, indulge me in a bit of mentioning. Here is a hodgepodge of possible primary nuisances: Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey; Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; former Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York; California Governor Gavin Newsom; Maryland Governor Wes Moore. This is a noncomprehensive list.

Let’s take the first Challenger X on the list, the newly reelected Whitmer, who, for the record, says she will not be running in 2024, regardless of what Biden does. She declared as much after her double-digit crushing of Republican Tudor Dixon in November. “Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says she is committed to a full second term,” reads the report in Bridge Michigan, the local publication to which she revealed her plans. The article refers to the 46th president as “aging Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.”

What might it look like if Whitmer did make a run at said “aging Democratic incumbent”? The how dare you types would be unpleasantly aroused. Words like ingrate, disloyal, and opportunist would be hurled in her face. She would be blamed for creating a turbulent situation for the self-styled “party of grown-ups,” and at a time when they can credibly portray Republicans as an irresponsible brigade of nutbags, cranks, and chaos agents. Whitmer would also, implicitly, be accused of not “waiting her turn.” Just as Obama was in 2008, when he opted to skip the line and sought the Democratic nomination, even though the groupthink memo at the time stipulated that it was Hillary Clinton’s turn.

But perhaps the pushback would not be as rough as Challenger X expected. In all likelihood, it would occur mostly in private or anonymously. Biden would be somewhat obliged to project calm and indifference in public. “The more the merrier,” the president and his surrogates would say through tight smiles. Nobody would benefit from any appearance of resentment.

[David A. Graham: The catch-24 of replacing Joe Biden]

Challenger X could earn goodwill by campaigning with class and expressing unrelenting gratitude to Biden. She could simply nod and shrug in response to the various admonitions. Emphasize her own credentials and the grave threat posed by Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or any other Republican. Say repeatedly that she would do whatever was necessary to help and support the president if primary voters nominated him again.

For any Challenger X, the main selling point would fall into the general classification of representing “new blood,” a “fresh start,” or some such. These terms would serve as polite stand-ins for the age issue rather than smears about Biden’s mental capacity. Another thematic argument would involve popular American ideals such as “choice” and “freedom.” As in: Democrats deserve a “choice” and should enjoy the “freedom” to vote for someone other than the oldest president in history—the guy well over half of you don’t want to run.

Challenger X would almost certainly receive tons of press coverage—probably good coverage, too, given that the media are predisposed to favor maverick-y candidates who inject unforeseen conflict into the process. When the voting starts, maybe this upstart would overperform—grabbing 35 percent or so in the early states, say. Maybe they wouldn’t surpass Biden, but could still reap the good coverage, gracefully drop out, and gain an immediate advantage for 2028. Or maybe Biden would take the hint, step away on his own, and let Democrats get on with picking their next class of national leaders. To some degree, the party has been putting this off since Obama was elected.

Quite obviously, Democrats today have a strong craving for someone other than the sitting president. (Also obvious: That someone is not the current vice president.) Many voters viewed Biden’s candidacy in 2020 as a one-term proposition. He suggested as much. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said nearly three years ago at a campaign event in Michigan, where he appeared with Harris, Booker, and Whitmer. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

Some mischief-maker should give Democrats a path to that future starting now. Voters bought the bridge in 2020. But when does it become a bridge too far?

Changi Naval Base, which sits on the east coast of Singapore near the busy shipping lanes of the Singapore Strait, has in the first months of 2023 been welcoming well-armed American visitors. Less than two weeks into the new year came a visit from the USS Makin Island, an amphibious assault ship. Days later, the USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier with a small city’s worth of crew members, made a port call—accompanied by three destroyers.

These types of visits are the most visible aspect of the increased military cooperation that is characteristic of President Joe Biden’s strategy for the Indo-Pacific, the region that encompasses the expanse of sea and nations from America’s Pacific coast to the Indian Ocean. U.S. troops have access to five military bases in the Philippines, which is a former U.S. colony and America’s oldest treaty ally in Asia. Earlier this month, the two countries reached an agreement that gives U.S. forces access to four more. That announcement followed a decision by American and Japanese officials to enhance their military cooperation.

The aim—sometimes spoken, other times left unsaid—of such developments is to counter China’s more assertive presence in the region. Washington now views Beijing as a growing threat to America and its partners and allies there. These concerns have only intensified since a spy balloon launched by China was shot down two weeks ago. Hence the Biden administration’s focus on defense and security in the Indo-Pacific.

[Anne Applebaum: China’s war against Taiwan has already started]

That focus, however, means that the administration has failed to advance a strong economic policy to match the military buildup. A remarkably broad-based consensus that this is a problem has coalesced both in D.C. foreign-policy circles and among political leaders in regional capitals. President Biden’s one significant gesture in this direction, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, was met with near-universal disappointment when it was unveiled last year.

Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, diplomatically referred to the short, buzzword-filled document as “baby steps”—and that was one of the most optimistic takes on the plan. Inu Manak, a trade-policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that it would “likely be a missed opportunity to deepen economic ties across the Pacific.” Van Jackson, a former Pentagon official who now lectures on international relations at Victoria University of Wellington, was more blunt—“no substance” was his verdict—when we spoke recently. “It exists to say they are doing something on political economy,” he said. But “just because they put the words there doesn’t mean it amounts to anything.”

The origins of this situation can be traced in part to Biden’s years as vice president in the Obama administration. Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” was much hyped at the time. Although this supposed strategic realignment of U.S. foreign policy looked promising on paper, it largely failed to materialize. Amid the challenges of other domestic and international developments, the plan languished, with few accomplishments other than, eventually, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This major trade agreement encompassing 12 Pacific Rim countries, including the U.S., and comprising about 40 percent of the global economy was finalized in early 2016.

[Read: Biden looks east]

By then, the deal had come under intense criticism in the U.S. Disliked by labor unions, it also faced bipartisan opposition in Congress and was never ratified. Donald Trump, who was highly critical of the agreement on the campaign trail, pulled the U.S. out of it on his first day in office, in 2017. (Hillary Clinton, who had earlier cheered the deal as secretary of state, also turned against it.) The countries involved moved on without the United States, signing an alternative deal in 2018; China applied to join it in 2021.

Trump himself obsessed over striking a trade deal with China and attempting to improve relations with North Korea. Yet he largely shunned Southeast Asia during his presidency, never bothering to show up at regional meetings.

Since taking office, Biden deserves credit for “not doing anything egregiously bad” in the Indo-Pacific, according to Blake Herzinger, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. But this is more by default than design, as two major foreign-policy challenges have drawn the White House’s attention away from the region: first, the withdrawal from Afghanistan; second, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The U.S. has cut the number of its naval transits through the Taiwan Strait, which have elicited furious reactions from Beijing in recent years. The frequency of “freedom-of-navigation operations,” as the U.S. calls passages through the South China Sea to challenge unlawful territorial claims, has also gone down. These changes were welcome in the region because they helped “cool down things with China,” Herzinger told me.

Although these more high-profile maneuvers have been reduced, Biden’s approach remains one that “prioritizes, very openly, [America’s] relationship with allies and partners,” according to Collin Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore who specializes in maritime security and naval affairs. The White House’s focus is on more low-key military bilateral engagements with other partners and countries, as well as larger multicountry exercises. “These are often overlooked,” Koh told me, “but might be more useful in building those relationships to begin with.”

[Read: Hillary Clinton’s hard choice on free trade]

Still glaringly absent, two years into Biden’s presidency, is a cohesive economic vision that could advance American interests. Missing from the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, most notably, was any mention of tariff reductions or addressing other market-access issues.

Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, has acknowledged “a lot of swirl about the fact that there is not tariff liberalization” in the framework. But she has defended this omission as a necessary step away from “traditional” trade deals that have contributed to the current “fragility” of economic ties in the region. This pitch has made few converts. A recent survey conducted across Southeast Asia by the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, a Singapore-based think tank, found that 42 percent of respondents were uncertain about the effectiveness of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Some 47 percent believed that it would have a positive impact in the region. Negotiations over the framework continue.

According to Herzinger, people like the United States not “because it is a democracy” but “because it is a powerful market and drives innovation.” Ideally, he said, countries in the region “want to see Washington get into trade agreements.” In his view, it is “likely to our detriment” that the U.S. is failing to participate.

Fundamentally, the U.S. still labors under a belief that “our military commitments are the oxygen that makes everything else in Asia possible,” Jackson, the Victoria University of Wellington lecturer, told me. “And it is security that underwrites everything.” Although the U.S. is focused on trying to contain and challenge China through sanctions, tariffs, and economic blacklists, he said, Washington appears to have given little, if any, thought to the effect of these measures in a region where China is the dominant economic force.

“The national securitization of the Asian political economy threatens the actual lifeblood of the region,” he said. “There seems to be no appreciation of that, because China remains 10 feet tall in the imagination of everybody in the Beltway.”

Jackson has laid out a number of progressive measures he believes could improve the political economy not just in the Indo-Pacific but across the global South, including trade agreements that incorporate measures to protect labor rights and improve supply chains, as well as reforms to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

[Read: To China, all’s fair in love and trade wars]

If the U.S. were to offer debt restructuring for countries in the region, which some experts have warned faces a mounting indebtedness crisis, that would be a bold way for the U.S. to reposition itself. Cambodia, where the U.S. is critical of expanding Chinese influence, owes the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars for a loan the country took in the early 1970s. Its longtime leader, Hun Sen, has called the debt “dirty” and appealed to multiple administrations to clear the obligation to repay it in full.

If the U.S. fails to act on that, Jackson told me, it will be helping fuel a “perverse cycle,” in which countries burdened by debt have little option but to seek additional capital from China. A concerted economic initiative from the U.S. could begin to address the problem, but “it is not possible to do that and chase shadows around the world.”  

The first line of Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy is succinct and clear: “The United States is an Indo-Pacific power,” the document released last year reads. There are, it boasts, more members of the U.S. military based in the region than in any other outside the U.S. itself. But if the U.S. wishes to maintain the lofty position in which it sees itself, an economic policy that complements its military presence appears to very much be needed.

Donald Trump is probably unaware that he’s an avid practitioner of a debating method known among philosophers and rhetoricians as the Gish Gallop. Its aim is simple: to defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments. Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it. Although his 2024 campaign has been fairly quiet so far, we can expect to hear a lot more Gish Galloping in the coming months.

Let’s take as an example the first televised presidential debate of the 2020 election campaign. The Fox News host Chris Wallace invited Trump to deliver a two-minute statement. And he was off:

So when I listen to Joe [Biden] talking about a transition, there has been no transition from when I won. I won that election. And if you look at crooked Hillary Clinton, if you look at all of the different people, there was no transition, because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my campaign … We’ve got it all on tape. We’ve caught ’em all. And by the way, you gave the idea for the Logan Act against General Flynn. You better take a look at that, because we caught you in a sense, and President Obama was sitting in the office. He knew about it, too. So don’t tell me about a free transition. As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster. A solicited ballot, okay, solicited, is okay. You’re soliciting. You’re asking. They send it back. You send it back. I did that. If you have an unsolicited—they’re sending millions of ballots all over the country. There’s fraud. They found ’em in creeks …

And so on, until the end of the second minute, when Wallace attempted to break in and end the monologue. He tried five times before regaining temporary control.

[Read: Communication experts’ advice for handling Trump’s interruptions]

Trump’s statement was the oratorical equivalent of the media-management approach famously summed up by Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon—“flood the zone with shit.” This is exactly what the Gish Gallop is designed to do: drown you in a deluge of distortions, deflections, and distractions.

This article is adapted from Hasan’s forthcoming book.

As one pithy tweet—now known as “Brandolini’s law”—put it, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” The Gish Galloper’s entire strategy rests on exploiting this advantage. By the time you’ve begun preparing your rebuttal of the Galloper’s first lie, they’ve rattled off another dozen. They want to trick the audience into believing that the facts and the evidence are on their side. (They have so many examples!) The technique is based on delivery over depth. Some call it “proof by verbosity.”

Trump may be the grand master of the Gish Gallop, but he is not its originator. That honor goes to the person who gave the method its name: Duane Tolbert Gish.

Gish was a biochemist at the Institute for Creation Research, a pseudo-scientific group that maintains all life on Earth was created in six days by the God of the Old Testament at some point in the past 10,000 years, with evolution playing no part. Gish publicized the ICR and its creed—and himself—by winning debates against evolutionists across the country. The writer John Grant explained the key to Gish’s approach in his 2014 book, Debunk It! Fake News Edition:

Gish would insist his opponent go first. After his opponent was finished with his or her argument, Gish would begin talking very quickly for perhaps an hour, reeling off a long string of “facts.” His debating opponent, of course, didn’t have the chance even to note down all those “facts,” let alone work out whether or not they were correct. In his or her rebuttal, the opponent could either ignore Gish’s tirade altogether, which would look like dodging the issue, or try to answer as many of the points as possible, which meant looking as if he or she were floundering.

In 1994, after watching Gish run rings around scholars and scientists, a frustrated Eugenie Scott, then the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, coined the phrase Gish Gallop. In these debates, Scott noted, “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”

The “nonsense” is an integral part of the Gish Gallop. Gish’s claims were repeatedly debunked, yet he regurgitated them again and again, at the same speed, in the same order, in debate after debate. As Skeptic magazine pointed out in 1996, “with a new audience and a new scientist to debate, who’s to know that his argument got shot down, with evidence, by that other evolutionist last week?”

Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited. In theory, rebutting these falsehoods point by point is the best way to stop a Gish Gallop. But in the real world, you rarely have the opportunity to do this.

So what do you do? From my days as a student debater at Oxford University to my decade as a TV interviewer, I’ve come across my fair share of Gish Gallopers. Here’s what I’ve learned about how to handle them.

1. Pick your battle.

Perhaps the first time I encountered a Gish Galloper in person was in 2013, during a debate on Islam and peace at the Oxford Union. One of my opponents, the far-right activist Anne Marie Waters, began her remarks with this word salad of an attack on my faith and my co-religionists:

Let me tell you what actually whips up fears of Islam. Let me take it from the top: 9/11; the London Underground bombings; Madrid; Mumbai; Mali; Bali; northern Nigeria; Sudan; Afghanistan; Saudi Arabia; Iran; Yemen; Pakistan; death for apostasy; death for blasphemy; death for adultery; death for homosexuality; gender segregation; gender discrimination; unequal testimony between men and women in legal proceedings; child marriage; amputations; beheadings; imprisonment for being raped; anti-Semitism; burqas; execution for this, that, and the other … This is what causes fear of Islam. It is not me; it is not my colleagues on this side … It is the actions of Muslims that are causing fear of Islam. That is the real world. That is where we actually live. Then we’ll be told this is just the extreme fringe of Islam. Well, let me have a look at Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam …

She Galloped on in this vein for several more minutes, piling one “example” of evil Muslims upon the next, and not stopping to expand or elaborate.

[Read: Therapists break down the debate’s toxic communication patterns]

There was no way I could address all of the supposed examples she cited to justify “fear of Islam”; she listed 33 items in less than two minutes—about one every four seconds.

This was no nuanced discussion about the problems of Islamist extremism. No, this was a screed that sought to taint all of Islam, and all Muslims—presumably myself included—as aiders and abetters of terrorism. Any effort I might make to draw distinctions and unpick some complex realities from this fabric of bigotry would be doomed. It would have taken several minutes, if not my entire allotted time. It also would have put me on the defensive, when the key to winning any argument is to put your opponent on the back foot. So, instead, I chose to zero in on the most ludicrous assertion: that Saudi Arabia was the “birthplace of Islam.”

“Just on a factual point,” I responded, “you said that Islam was born in Saudi Arabia. Islam was born in 610 A.D. Saudi Arabia was born in 1932 A.D. So you were only 1,322 years off! Not bad.”

By mocking and debunking that particular claim, I poured doubt on the rest of them—and made my opponent look foolish in the process.

When facing a Gish Galloper, going line by line is impractical, if not impossible. Instead, single out their weakest claim or argument. Highlight and mock it.

This sort of rebuttal isn’t always going to work, and I don’t recommend it when your opponent has put together a cohesive argument. But it works well against a common tactic for Gallopers: surrounding their central, wrongheaded argument with an array of irrelevant facts. Pick on the core claim and ignore the others.

2. Call them out.

Don’t let your audience be fooled into assuming that your opponent has special command of the subject because of all the “facts” they’ve just spouted. Explain to them what your opponent is doing, and that the Gallop is really just a sleight of hand.

Another devotee of the Gish Gallop is Russian President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, the former KGB agent and his acolytes in state-run media have perfected what a RAND Corporation study dubbed “the firehose of falsehood.” Whether justifying the illegal invasion of Ukraine or interfering in U.S. elections, the Russian government—to quote from the study—uses “high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”

But the RAND study also offers—albeit at risk of overextending its metaphor—this piece of handy advice for fighting disinformation: “Don’t expect to counter Russia’s firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth. Instead, put raincoats on those at whom the firehose is aimed.”

Putting “raincoats” on your audience means making them aware of what a Gish Galloper is subjecting them to. Point out, for example, that the speed at which they’re speaking is a sign of deceit, not intelligence. Or even that they’re relying on a favorite tactic of the Kremlin’s.

3. Don’t budge.

Above all, make sure you stop Gish Gallopers midstream. And then don’t let them move on to the next falsehood. Keep pounding at them with a well-prepared rebuttal. They may not concede the point, but they’ve been derailed and are now forced to argue on your terms, not theirs.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s confession]

For years, Trump Gish Galloped unchecked, disorienting opponents and audiences alike. Unprepared, time-limited, or weak-willed interviewers and moderators would fail to interject, correct, or take a pause to respond to his nonsense. That is, until August 2020, when my friend Jonathan Swan, then a national political correspondent for Axios, sat down with the then-president for a televised interview.

Trump tried to recite a bunch of dodgy stats on COVID-19, to pretend he had the pandemic under control. But Swan wouldn’t let him. When Trump started waving a bunch of printouts of graphs and tables, Swan inspected them and debunked the president’s claims in real time. Throughout, Swan gave Trump plenty of openings to speak, but he never let him get up to Galloping speed.

As soon as it aired, Swan’s interview went viral. This was the rare moment that revealed Trump’s Gish Gallop for exactly what it was: a deliberate strategy to deflect and distract.

So when you’re faced with someone like Trump, who’s spouting lie after lie, pick your battle, call them out, and don’t budge. Beyond their bumbling and bullshitting, they actually do have a strategy—so you should, too.

This article has been adapted from Mehdi Hasan’s forthcoming book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking.

Nikki Haley is running for president. She is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the former governor of South Carolina. She is a savvy communicator and conservative. And she is a woman.

In 2023, thank goodness, Haley’s candidacy will not be defined by her sex—a credit to all the women who have run before and toppled expectations. And yet, Haley is the only woman to enter the 2024 presidential race so far, and that might remain the case. The fact of her sex will create opportunities and pitfalls—especially when it comes to the question of how she campaigns against the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump.

I saw a version of this dynamic play out eight years ago, when I ran Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign. Our biggest hurdle was getting attention in a crowded field of 16 other Republican candidates, all of whom were men. At the first GOP primary debate, in the summer of 2015, we were relegated to the “kiddy table,” a pre-prime-time event with the lowest-polling candidates. Fiorina was widely seen as the winner of the debate, but her performance was quickly eclipsed by the shadow that Trump cast. At that point, our only available strategy was as annoying as it was obvious: If we wanted to get noticed, we needed Trump to attack Fiorina.

That wasn’t going to be a problem. Trump has an odd relationship with women. Sure, he insults everyone he deems insufficiently loyal and deferential to him, regardless of gender. But women garner a special type of attention from him—sometimes positive, sometimes negative. His attacks on Megyn Kelly, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi stand out among many examples of how vicious he can be toward women; each of them has male colleagues and counterparts whom Trump more often ignored. At the same time, Trump also singles out women to promote and elevate—Elise Stefanik, Kari Lake, Pam Bondi. And I think we all know who Trump’s favorite kid is.

[Read: Inside Ivanka’s dreamworld]

This sets up a paradox for any female candidate running against Trump: You might get extra attention from him, and you might well need that attention. But his attacks can also underscore the fact that you are a woman, and add to the sexism you are already facing.

The old adage about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—that she did everything he did but backwards and in heels—also applies in politics. For starters, it’s literally true. At the second GOP debate in the 2016 race, when CNN built a scaffolded stage so that Air Force One could be in the background at the Reagan Library, the debate organizers had to figure out how to build Fiorina a separate women’s bathroom. To access it, she had to get down a grated-metal staircase, in heels, with pantyhose, all within a five-minute commercial break. She opted to hold it for the duration of the two-hour debate. More seriously, running for president as a woman is still harder than running as a man. Haley faces an electorate that has not yet proved that it’s ready to elect a woman president.

But there’s another side to the dancing metaphor that is often overlooked. There were more eyes on Ginger Rogers than on Fred Astaire. She had the flowy dress and the long legs and the blond hair; he had the black suit. In politics, as in life, whatever makes you different also lets you stand out. Women make up the majority of grocery shoppers, teachers, and PTA members, and those experiences affect how we think about economic issues and school curricula. For most of us, our views about public safety are informed by the fear we feel when walking to our car at night. Haley starts with a certain advantage over her male peers because she knows what it means to be a woman, and women make up the majority of American voters.

But Donald Trump.

In the fall of 2015, Trump was giving an interview to Rolling Stone when he saw Fiorina pop up on a nearby TV screen. “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!” he told the magazine. “I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not [supposed to] say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” Fiorina was asked about the quote during the Reagan Library debate, and although our campaign team had of course talked about Trump’s comments, we’d never rehearsed her answer. “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” she replied, to applause. It knocked Trump down for the rest of the debate. In response, he stammered out something about her being a “beautiful woman,” which made the moment even more cringeworthy.

It worked. Three days after the debate, Fiorina had jumped 12 points in the polls—she was now sitting in second place—and Trump had dropped eight points. Donations were pouring in. We suddenly felt like we had momentum. The problem was that she had been so effective against Trump that he never mentioned her name again. Our campaign spent the next six months drowning in his silence while the male candidates talked about the relative size of their “hands” on the debate stage. When it came to our media coverage, it turned out that even sexist attention was better than no attention at all.

So what does this mean for Haley as she figures out how to go up against Trump? It depends on what she wants out of this campaign. She can play to win, try for the vice presidency, or build for next time.

Haley surely knows she is a long shot to win the nomination. The Republican primary is beginning to look like the 2008 Democratic contest: All of the focus was on Hillary Clinton, the inevitable, and Barack Obama, the alternative. Nobody cared about John Edwards or Joe Biden. Haley is going to have a near-impossible time being taken seriously as long as Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis remain the focus of the Republican field.

But winning isn’t the only reason people run for president; sometimes they’re just hoping for a spot on the ticket. Fiorina ran a major U.S. company (Hewlett-Packard) and was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in California. I don’t think she did a single major interview in the 2016 campaign where she escaped having to answer the question “Are you running for vice president?” It was infuriating. I don’t remember any of the men getting asked this question. (Then, when the primary got down to the final three candidates, Ted Cruz asked her to be his running mate. So we sure proved everyone wrong.) Still, there’s no denying that running for president elevated Fiorina’s profile. She almost certainly would have been the VP pick or a high-ranking Cabinet secretary for 16 of the 17 GOP candidates. Too bad that 17th guy won.

As with Fiorina, the problem for Haley is that Trump is very unlikely to pick her to be his running mate. Since leaving his administration, Haley has awkwardly danced between praising and criticizing Trump. Then, after saying she would not run against him, she decided she would. She has already failed Trump’s first (and arguably only) test for women: loyalty to him in all things. Even if she helps him take down DeSantis, it won’t be enough. That’s a reason for her to root for DeSantis and even help him defeat Trump, in the hopes of becoming DeSantis’s VP pick.

[Read: Why Fiorina won]

A more obvious reason to run for president is simply to stay relevant for the next campaign. There is a long history of repeat candidates winning their party’s nomination on a second try. For Haley’s own political ambitions, a Trump nomination might be the best outcome: Whether he won or lost the general election, the GOP field would be open again in four years.

If Haley uses this campaign as her practice round, she can focus on selling her strengths as a candidate, building a national fundraising base, and increasing her name recognition. To do that, she needs to be part of the conversation. She needs to land punches against both Trump and DeSantis to get them to engage with her, and then weather the inevitable attacks. And she has to do it without alienating Trump’s or DeSantis’s voters.

So far, Haley is signaling that she’s willing to challenge her rivals. “I don’t put up with bullies,” she said in her campaign video. “And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.” Now she just has to hope that Trump takes the bait. He usually does.

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Only a few years ago, democracies around the world seemed to be turning toward the pluto-populists, the wealthy men and women who convinced millions of ordinary voters that liberal democracy had run its course. They’re still out there—but their star may be dimming.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Do Republicans not know Trump will betray them? The hidden link between workaholism and mental health Someday, you might be able to eat your way out of a cold.

Pushing Back the Tide

In the autumn of 2017, I was in the Czech Republic on a speaking tour at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State to talk about the problem of disinformation and democracy. One night in Pilsen, a lovely city about an hour from Prague, I finished my presentation and asked for questions and discussion. A young man, speaking very good English, asked me if I would like to comment on the idea that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were involved with a ring of pedophiles, a common internet conspiracy theory that had already been around for a while and is now at the heart of the QAnon madness. I responded that this was a debunked story and that I was not going to be drawn into a debate about it.

After the talk, I spoke with this young man. I said, “You know better than this.” He smiled and admitted that the story was bunk, but that he’d just wanted to see what I would say. “And to make sure everyone in the room heard it,” I said. He smiled again and shrugged.

In other cities around the Czech Republic that fall, I fielded questions that included other conspiracy theories about NATO, the European Union, or Ukraine (or all three together); the movement of American nuclear weapons; criticism of the Western outrage at Russia for seizing Crimea; and other topics that seemed to be pulled right off of trashy websites. I began to see why other members of my various audiences (usually university-age young people) were pessimistic: In a country where Russian propaganda fell from the skies like electronic acid rain and oozed from computers like sludge from a cracked sewer pipe, how could ordinary citizens ever make informed decisions?

At the time, the Czech government was led by a pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, who was soon to be joined in the government by a populist prime minister, Andrej Babiš. A billionaire, Babiš campaigned on the high-minded slogan that “everybody steals” and vowed to run the government like a company. (That should sound familiar to American voters who had to listen to similar cynical bloviations from Donald Trump for so many years.) Zeman won a second term in 2018, and Babiš remained prime minister until late 2021. Pro-Western sentiment in the Czech Republic, as well as in other former Warsaw Pact nations that had since joined NATO, looked to be fizzling out.

Last month, Babiš not only lost his bid for the Czech presidency but also lost it to Petr Pavel, a retired Czech general who once held a senior position in NATO’s military leadership. Pavel is a newcomer to politics, but he clobbered Babiš—who by sheer virtue of name recognition and money should have been the favorite—garnering 58 percent of the vote in an election with a record 70 percent turnout. That’s not a squeaker; that’s a repudiation. Babiš, especially when faced with the coronavirus pandemic, was lousy at governing, as populists almost always are. But the Russian onslaught against Ukraine also seemed to break the spell for many Czechs, and this election is likely one more example of Vladimir Putin’s brutality in Ukraine undoing years of the careful propaganda that once bolstered Russia’s position in the world.

Pavel’s career began in the Czechoslovak military, where he was a member of the Communist Party. (This caused some griping and cheap shots among his opponents, but a young officer joining the Party as a matter of course was an expected part of a military career in those days.) After 1990, Pavel served in a United Nations peacekeeping mission and later as the chairman of NATO’s military committee, the top military body in the Atlantic Alliance.

If you want a sense of his campaign, one of his signs said, “Enough of chaos. I offer order and dignity.” (Again, millions of American voters can probably relate.) His views are an about-face from those of figures such Zeman and Babiš; he is proud of Czech aid to Ukraine and has said that the Ukrainians now “really deserve” NATO membership. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, but it is refreshing to see a government in Prague taking the regime in Moscow seriously as a mortal threat.

This is all good news not only for the Western allies but for democracy itself. Nevertheless, Pavel and the leaders of other democracies still have a full plate. The Czech presidency has some influence as a national symbol, but the Republic is a parliamentary system in which executive power rests with the prime minister (currently the center-right politician Petr Fiala). And in a classic Trumpy move, Babiš issued this ominous farewell: “Forget Babiš. Try to live without Babiš. Stop waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night feeling hatred for Babiš.” What this likely means, of course, is that Babiš—who still commands significant political and material resources—will be back.

Likewise, the move to the populist right is not over in neighboring Poland. And Viktor Orbán still rules Hungary, attended by a circle of American courtiers who believe he is the future of post-liberalism. (One of his admirers, Rod Dreher, just made the foolish mistake of accidentally reporting the truth: He publicized some of Orbán’s creepy pro-Russian and anti–European Union comments, and then backtracked quickly.)

Still, the Czech diplomat Petr Tuma (now in residence at the Atlantic Council, in Washington) is right to note that Pavel’s win “seems to follow a tide turning against global populism, including the defeats of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa.” We could add the American 2022 midterm elections to this list.

It’s been a tough few years for democracy, but populist leaders—as they almost inevitably do—are now reminding voters that they never have very much to offer beyond angry slogans, mistrust, and paranoia. (These days, many of them also have Putin’s war hanging around their neck.) The Czech presidential election is one more reminder that when voters decide in favor of freedom and decency, and then actually show up at the polls, democracy wins.

Related:

The Czech Republic’s fake-news problem (2017) We might have reached peak populism. (2021)

Today’s News

Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a vote supported by the GOP House majority. The U.S. is increasing its military presence in the Philippines as part of an effort to counter China and prepare for a possible conflict over Taiwan. More than 15 million people in the Northeast are under wind-chill warnings or advisories, with potentially record-low temperatures expected starting tomorrow.

Evening Read

Joseph Prezioso / AFP / Getty

Tyre Nichols Wanted to Capture the Sunset

By Clint Smith

Vincent van Gogh’s painting Willows at Sunset is a dazzling kaleidoscope of twilight. The canvas is awash in orange and yellow brushstrokes, as if the painter meant to depict the world ablaze. An asymmetrical sun hovers in the background while beams of light shoot across the sky. Terra-cotta grass leans in the wind that I imagine van Gogh felt slide across his cheek. Three pollarded willows rise up from the earth and bend like bodies frozen mid-dance. Shades of black expand across their barren trunks, as if they are about to be swallowed by the oncoming night.

The piece, painted in 1888, wasn’t originally meant to be shared with the world. The wide brushstrokes on the canvas have led art historians to believe that van Gogh painted the image quickly, perhaps as a sketch for another work—the artist’s attempt to capture the majesty of a sunset before it slipped beyond the horizon.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

We’re bungling the COVID wind-down. Biden’s document issue is nothing like Trump’s. Photos: Viking fire festival

Culture Break

Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, and Kristen Cui in "Knock at the Cabin" (Phobymo / Universal Pictures)

Read. Elaine Hsieh Chou’s new short story, “Background.”

“Gene knew parents could be withholding, cold, distant. He didn’t know children could be too.”

Watch. M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin infuses a ludicrous horror concept with a healthy dose of tenderness.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’ve never been to Prague, it’s a wonderful place and one of my favorite cities. It’s also, arguably, where the Soviet empire began its slide into oblivion. In early 1968, reformers in the then-Czechoslovak leadership took over the government (thus giving us the term “Prague Spring” that we now apply to other uprisings). In August, Soviet tanks moved in and crushed the whole project, causing many of the men and women in the old Eastern bloc, and in the U.S.S.R. itself, to doubt their faith in Moscow and the future of Soviet communism. One of the best books on this, Nightfrost in Prague, was written by one of the officials who was forcibly taken to the Kremlin, but unfortunately, it’s out of print and kind of hard to get.

A former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, Norman Eisen, however, wrote a book in 2018 titled The Last Palace, which is a good introduction to the city and its history—and even its architecture, too, as it is told through the notable history of the ambassador’s residence. Eisen is known to news junkies as a regular commenter on cable news; he was the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including during Trump’s impeachment. The history of Central Europe can get a bit chewy for a general reader; instead, give The Last Palace a read—but beware of the urge it will instill in you to go and walk along the Charles Bridge.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

No equivalence exists in the ways that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have respectively handled the classified documents found in their possession. Yet panicky Democrats—ruled either by a thirst for TV airtime or by a knee-jerk defensive reflex—are suggesting that one does.

Biden’s enemies might be expected to use an argument of false equivalence to attack him, but surely not people who are supposed to be his allies. I’m talking to you, Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Jim Himes.

Biden should be “embarrassed by the situation,” Durbin told CNN, adding that the president had “lost the high ground on this notion of classified information being where it shouldn’t be.”

“Anytime there are classified documents outside of a secure space, I am profoundly troubled, whether that space is owned by a Republican president or a Democratic president,” Himes said, also to CNN. “It’s a big problem.”

If anything should embarrass or trouble these Democrats, it is their failure to examine the facts and grasp the utter difference in the Biden and Trump cases. What in tarnation are they doing?

In their flap, they have forgotten the first principle of politics: What matters above all is public opinion and preventing a distorted narrative from becoming entrenched.

[David Axelrod: Yes, Mr. President, there is some there there]

According to a recent NBC poll, about two-thirds of Americans are now as concerned about Biden’s handling of classified documents as they are about Trump’s, despite the gulf of difference between the president’s actions and those of the habitual scofflaw Trump. What’s most worrying is Biden’s standing among Democratic voters: A majority of Democrats surveyed, 52 percent, said they’re concerned about Biden’s documents, just one point less than the percentage of Republicans who are concerned about Trump’s.

In other words, these Democratic chin-scratchers on TV are giving license to Trump and smearing Biden. Halt! If not in the name of the law, then of common sense.

The law is actually on their side, if they bothered to find out about it. In recent weeks, I have spoken with a number of highly regarded attorneys on the issue, and begged them, please, to find me a non-laughable defense of Trump’s handling of the Mar-a-Lago documents. They simply could not.

So the false equivalence that these Democrats are promoting is this: On the one hand, Biden made an error about which he was apparently unaware and that he promptly sought to correct, acting properly in tandem with the authorities in every respect; on the other hand, Trump as usual used the law as a roll of heavy-duty Charmin, repeatedly obstructing the National Archives, the FBI, and the Department of Justice, and persisting in the concealment of secret documents in his possession. It shouldn’t need saying, but apparently it does for some Democrats: These are not the same.

Telling the truth about the differences is not only the right thing to do; it’s the politically smart thing to do. In politics, offense is the best defense.

[Donald Ayer], Mark S. Zaid, and Dennis Aftergut: Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy

Democrats are coming off the most impressive midterm cycle led by a Democratic president in generations. In large part because of the president’s historic accomplishments during his first term, voters turned back the Republican fear campaign.

So Democrats are on a roll. And if Trump is the GOP’s nominee in 2024, they have every opportunity to run up the score on a wounded candidate who has led his party to nothing but losses since his election in 2016. Even if Trump does not win the Republican nomination, his base will continue to be a liability for the GOP: A Bulwark poll this week found that a full 28 percent of Republican voters would support Trump if he stood for a third party.

Yet all of this can be drowned out by just one narrative. Republicans love nothing better than to turn something baseless into something pervasive. And Democrats too often act as mindless accomplices, giving credence to the false equivalences that bubble up when the media cover Trump-related partisan issues. A recent report from Media Matters outlines the underlying pathology: Although Biden freely handed over the few documents in his possession to the Department of Justice and opened up his home to searches, parts of the news media are now discounting the significance of Trump’s document mishandling.

The CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel prepared the way. Trump “clearly wanted to keep those things as souvenirs or for whatever and fought giving them back,” said Gangel on CNN, but the Biden documents story “may help him legally.” Legally? Let’s just say that I would have flunked my first year of law school if I’d said that.

Through this sort of speculation, some pundits are suggesting that the special prosecutors appointed in each case, Jack Smith and Robert Hur, will somehow end up paying more attention to each other than to the facts of the matter before them. I doubt that Smith or Hur needs CNN to explain the centrality of intent in criminal law. But the CNN analyst Margaret Talev recently said, “I think, Pence revelations aside, the drip, drip of the Biden discoveries does defuse this issue, takes it off the table as a real weapon to use against Trump.”

[David A. Graham: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

In the absence of robust counterarguments from Democratic leaders, such statements are being served up to a nightly audience that largely comprises Democratic voters. And by going along with the false premise, Democrats are filling their own supporters with despair.

Let’s revisit the nightmare of 2016 to understand what could lie ahead. Thanks to a similar dynamic of media herd mentality and Democratic defensiveness over Hillary Clinton’s emails, a 2016 poll found that nearly half of Americans saw the issue as “very concerning.” The narrative about Biden’s documents is in danger of taking root in much the same way—that’s what the polling today is showing. All these years later, does anyone know that Clinton mishandled zero classified documents among her emails? I’ll say it again: zero.

If the DOJ-appointed Hur goes about his business like a straight shooter, Biden will be exonerated. But if the media smear continues, it will be with the unbidden assistance of pearl-clutching Democrats. Next year could be the same as 2016, if they don’t correct the course now.

Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?

If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, what you do is mock your opponent’s affliction. In August, the Oz campaign released a list of “concessions” it would offer to the Democrat John Fetterman in a candidates’ debate, including:

“We will allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff, in real time.” And: “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.”

Oz’s derision of his opponent’s medical condition continued right up until Oz lost the race by more than 250,000 votes. Oz’s defeat flipped the Pennsylvania seat from Republican to Democrat, dooming GOP hopes of a Senate majority in 2023.

A growing number of Republicans are now pointing their finger at Donald Trump for the party’s disappointments in the 2022 elections, with good reason. Trump elevated election denial as an issue and burdened his party with a lot of election-denying candidates—and voters decisively repudiated them.

But not all of Trump’s picks were obviously bad. Oz was for years a successful TV pitchman, trusted by millions of Americans for health advice. The first Muslim nominated for a Senate run by a major party, he advanced Republican claims to represent 21st-century America. Oz got himself tangled up between competing positions on abortion, sometimes in consecutive sentences, precisely because he hoped to position himself as moderate on such issues.

But Oz’s decision to campaign as a jerk hurt him. When his opponent got sick, Oz could have drawn on his own medical background for compassion and understanding. Before he succumbed to the allure of TV, Oz was an acclaimed doctor whose innovations transformed the treatment of heart disease. He could have reminded voters of his best human qualities rather than displaying his worst.

The choice to do the opposite was his, not Trump’s.

[Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point]

And Oz was not unique. Many of the unsuccessful Republican candidates in 2022 offered voters weird, extreme, or obnoxious personas. Among the worst was Blake Masters, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. He released photos and campaign videos of himself playing with guns, looking like a sociopath. He lost by nearly five points. Trump endorsed Masters in the end, but Trump wasn’t the one who initially selected or funded him. That unsavory distinction belongs to the tech billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who invested big and early in the campaign of his former university student.

Performative trolling did not always lead to failure. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis indulged in obnoxious stunts in 2022. He promoted anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists. He used the power of government to punish corporations that dissented from his culture-war policies. He spent $1.5 million of taxpayer money to send asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard.

But DeSantis was an incumbent executive with a record of accomplishment. Antics intended to enrapture the national Fox News audience could be offset by actions to satisfy his local electorate: restoring the Everglades, raising teacher pay, and reopening public schools early despite COVID risks.

DeSantis’s many Republican supporters must now ponder: What happens when and if the governor takes his show on the road? “Pragmatic on state concerns, divisive on national issues!” plays a little differently in a presidential race than it does at the state level. But the early indications are that he’s sticking with divisiveness: A month after his reelection, DeSantis is bidding for the anti-vax vote by promoting extremist allegations from the far fringes that modern vaccines threaten public health.

A generation ago, politicians invested great effort in appearing agreeable: Ronald Reagan’s warm chuckle, Bill Clinton’s down-home charm, George W. Bush’s smiling affability. By contrast, Donald Trump delighted in name-calling, rudeness, and open disdain. Not even his supporters would have described Trump as an agreeable person. Yet he made it to the White House all the same—in part because of this trollish style of politics, which has encouraged others to emulate him.

[Ilana E. Strauss]: How science explains why some politicians are jerks

Has our hyper-polarized era changed the old rules of politics? James Poniewozik’s 2019 book, Audience of One, argues that Trump’s ascendancy was the product of a huge shift in media culture. The three big television networks of yore had sought to create “the least objectionable program”; they aimed to make shows that would offend the fewest viewers. As audiences fractured, however, the marketplace rewarded content that excited ever narrower segments of American society. Reagan and Clinton were replaced by Trump for much the same reason Walter Cronkite was replaced by Sean Hannity.

It’s an ingenious theory. But, as Poniewozik acknowledges, democratic politics in a two-party system remains an inescapably broadcast business. Trump’s material sold well enough in 2016 to win (with help from FBI Director James Comey’s intervention against Hillary Clinton, Russian hackers amplified by the Trump campaign, and the mechanics of the Electoral College). But in 2020, Trump met the political incarnation of the Least Objectionable Program: Joe Biden, who is to politics what Jay Leno was to late-night entertainment.

Trump-led Republicans have now endured four bad elections in a row. In 2018, they lost the House. In 2020, they lost the presidency. In 2021, they lost the Senate. In 2022, they won back the House—barely—but otherwise failed to score the gains one expects of the opposition party in a midterm. They suffered a net loss of one Senate seat and two governorships. They failed to flip a single chamber in any state legislature. In fact, the Democrats gained control of four: one each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and both in Michigan.

Plausible theories about why Republicans fared so badly in 2022 abound. The economy? Gas prices fell in the second half of 2022, while the economy continued to grow. Abortion? The Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, and Republican officeholders began musing almost immediately about a national ban, while draconian restrictions began spreading through the states. Attacks on democracy? In contest after contest, Republicans expressed their contempt for free elections, and independent voters responded by rejecting them.

All of these factors clearly played a role. But don’t under-​weight the impact of the performative obnoxiousness that now pervades Republican messaging. Conservatives have built career paths for young people that start on extremist message boards and lead to jobs on Republican campaigns, then jobs in state and federal offices, and then jobs in conservative media.

Former top Trump-administration officials set up a well-funded dark-money group, Citizens for Sanity, that spent millions to post trolling messages on local TV in battleground states, intended to annoy viewers into voting Republican, such as “Protect pregnant men from climate discrimination.” The effect was just to make the Republicans seem juvenile.

In 2021, then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy posted a video of himself reading aloud from Dr. Seuss to protest the Seuss estate’s withdrawing some works for being racially insensitive (although he took care to read Green Eggs and Ham, not one of the withdrawn books).

Trump himself often seemed to borrow his scripts from a Borscht Belt insult comic—for instance, performing imagined dialogues making fun of his opponent’s adult children during the 2020 campaign.

This is not a “both sides” story. Democratic candidates don’t try to energize their base by “owning the conservatives”; that’s just not a phrase you hear. The Democratic coalition is bigger and looser than the Republican coalition, and it’s not clear that Democrats even have an obvious “base” the way that Republicans do. The people who heeded Representative Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden in South Carolina do not necessarily have much in common with those who knocked on doors for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. Trying to energize all of the Democratic Party’s many different “bases” with deliberate offensiveness against perceived cultural adversaries would likely fizzle at best, and backfire at worst. On the Republican side, however, the politics of performance can be—or seem—rewarding, at least in the short run.

This pattern of behavior bids fair to repeat itself in 2024. As I write these words at the beginning of 2023, the conservative world is most excited not by the prospect of big legislative action from a Republican House majority, and not by Trump’s declared candidacy for president in 2024 or by DeSantis’s as-yet-undeclared one, but by the chance to repeat its 2020 attacks on the personal misconduct of President Biden’s son Hunter.

In the summer of 2019, the Trump administration put enormous pressure on the newly elected Zelensky administration in Ukraine to announce some kind of criminal investigation of the Biden family. This first round of Trump’s project to manufacture an anti-Biden scandal exploded into Trump’s first impeachment.

The failure of round one did not deter the Trump campaign. It tried again in 2020. This time, the scandal project was based on sexually explicit photographs and putatively compromising emails featuring Hunter Biden. The story the Trump campaign told about how it obtained these materials sounded dubious: Hunter Biden himself supposedly delivered his computer to a legally blind repairman in Delaware but never returned to retrieve it—so the repairman tracked down Rudy Giuliani and handed over a copy of the hard drive. The repairman had also previously given the laptop itself to the FBI. Far-fetched stories can sometimes prove true, and so might this one.

Whatever the origin of the Hunter Biden materials, the authenticity of at least some of which has been confirmed by reputable media outlets, there’s no dispute about their impact on the 2020 election. They flopped.

Pro-Trump Republicans could never accept that their go-to tactic had this time failed. Somebody or something else had to be to blame. They decided that this somebody or something was Twitter, which had briefly blocked links to the initial New York Post story on the laptop and its contents.

So now the new Twitter—and Elon Musk allies who have been offered privileged access to the company’s internal workings—is trying again to elevate the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, and to allege a cover-up involving the press, tech companies, and the national-security establishment. It’s all very exciting to the tiny minority of Americans who closely follow political schemes. And it’s all pushing conservatives and Republicans back onto the same doomed path they followed in the Trump years: stunts and memes and insults and fabricated controversies in place of practical solutions to the real problems everyday people face. The party has lost contact with the sensibility of mainstream America, a huge country full of decent people who are offended by bullying and cruelty.

There’s talk of some kind of review by the Republican National Committee of what went wrong in 2022. If it happens, it will likely focus on organization, fundraising, and technology. For any political operation, there is always room to improve in these areas. But if the party is to thrive in the post-Trump era, it needs to start with something more basic: at least pretend to be nice.

* Lead image source credits: Chris Graythen / Getty; Ed Jones / AFP / Getty; Drew Angerer / Getty; Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Brandon Bell / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Party of Trolls.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.