The White House Correspondents' Association dinner - known for its fun albeit ferocious jabs at Washington - took a more solemn tone this year as President Joe Biden acknowledged the several American journalists under siege in authoritarian countries around the world.

The White House Correspondents' Association dinner - known for its fun albeit ferocious jabs at Washington - took a more solemn tone this year as President Joe Biden acknowledged the several American journalists under siege in authoritarian countries around the world.

Donald Trump inspires an uncommon devotion among his most ardent followers, which can obscure a surprising fact about his present political position: Many, if not most, Republicans do not want him to be their party’s next nominee for president. As of today, according to the polling averages of both FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics, Trump has consolidated only half of the Republican primary vote, with the rest split among Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and a handful of other alternatives. The numbers suggest that despite the former president’s best efforts, half of his own party’s voters want to move on. What they can’t agree on is who should displace Trump as their standard-bearer.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2016, Trump was repeatedly outpolled by the field of Republican candidates, and hovered around 35 percent on the eve of the Iowa caucuses in February, which he then lost to Senator Ted Cruz. But as the campaign wore on, Trump’s devoted following of a third of GOP primary voters was enough to propel him to victory over a divided group of opponents. He was greatly helped by their tactics—or lack thereof. Instead of attacking Trump as the front-runner, his rivals assailed one another, hoping that Trump would collapse of his own accord and they would inherit his supporters. Rather than consolidate behind a single alternative to Trump, the other contenders fought onward in state after state. This infighting enabled Trump to scoop up the most delegates, even though he never won a state with more than 50 percent of the vote until New York’s primary, on April 19. Soon, Trump’s opponents were out of money and he was the presumptive nominee.

The primary worked out poorly for the GOP establishment and its professional politicians, who found themselves on the losing end of a hostile takeover by an outsider. Yet in the run-up to the 2024 election, the Republican Party looks set to repeat this pattern, with Trump cruising to renomination amid a splintered field. The question is why.

A week ago, conservatives gathered at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kickoff, a prelude to the presidential campaign. For Trump’s challengers, the event offered the opportunity to introduce themselves to an influential electorate and explain why they should succeed the former president as the Republican nominee. But that is not exactly what happened. “The candidates who bothered to make the trip barely bothered to try to knock the front-runner from his perch,” The New York Times reported. “Their strategy appeared straightforward: Avoid confrontation with the better-known, better-funded front-runners, hope Mr. Trump’s attacks take out—or at least take down—Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is second in most Republican polls, and hope outside forces, namely indictments, take out Mr. Trump.” Indeed, the only candidate who drew any fire at all was DeSantis, who did not attend the gathering, and ended up serving less as an alternative to Trump than as his human shield.

Trump enters the 2024 campaign with an array of new vulnerabilities that could be readily exploited by an ambitious opponent eager to appeal to the Republican primary electorate. You got rolled by Dr. Fauci and locked down the country, then lost to a doddering old man in an election you claimed was stolen but whose heist you proved powerless to prevent, they might say. Challengers like DeSantis might also point to national polls that show the Florida governor outperforming Trump in a matchup with President Joe Biden (who himself once rode an air of electability to the nomination). While you and your handpicked candidates in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania have been losing elections, I’ve been winning them by historic margins in Florida.

[Read: Just call Trump a loser]

So far, none of this has happened. The arguments may be there, but no one of consequence is making them. Instead, history seems poised to repeat, with Trump primed to win renomination against a divided field of opponents who refuse to take him on until it’s too late. This may appear baffling, but there are actually good reasons no challenger has been willing to take the fight to Trump.

To begin with, it’s easy to propose that Trump-skeptical Republicans should unite behind a single theoretical candidate. It’s a lot harder to find an actual candidate who can unite them. Ron DeSantis voters want something different than Nikki Haley voters, who want something different than voters for Senator Tim Scott. Back in 2020, the Democratic Party solved a similar problem by turning to Biden to defeat the surging socialist Bernie Sanders. But Biden was a popular former vice president whom most factions found acceptable, if not ideal. No candidate in today’s Republican Party has Biden’s broad shoulders and innocuous appeal.

Similarly, Biden’s success was made possible by his lock on a core constituency of the Democratic primary electorate: Black voters. He lost badly in the early primary states, but took 49 percent in South Carolina, buoyed by then–House Whip Jim Clyburn’s fulsome endorsement. In the 2024 Republican primary, only one candidate has the demonstrated devotion of a key constituency, and that’s Trump with his base.

This is also why tearing into Trump is such an imposing prospect. While it’s true that there are new lines of attack that might work on today’s Trump, whoever is the first to unleash them will likely bear the brunt of the backlash from his supporters. No candidate wants to be the first into the fray, because turning on Trump may doom their prospects, even if it opens up political space for others.

This is the reason Republican contenders have once again fallen back on the hope that Trump will collapse on his own, and that outside forces—the justice system, the media, even old age—will swoop in and take care of the former president for them. But Trump’s indictments won’t sway Republican primary voters who have already dismissed them, and the mainstream media’s critical coverage won’t persuade GOP loyalists who don’t read or trust it.

The hard truth that Republican challengers have yet to absorb is that if their strategy to beat Trump is to hope that someone else beats Trump for them, they are not serious alternatives to Trump. Likewise, expecting people outside the Republican Party to police the Republican Party is not a strategy; it’s a surrender. The only actors who have any chance of altering the primary’s trajectory are those with credibility in Republican politics, whether they are politicians or popular commentators. There’s no guarantee that taking on Trump will yield a different outcome, but refusing to do so guarantees him a glide path to the nomination.

There will be one glaring absence among the dignitaries at King Charles' coronation: US President Joe Biden.

It was a black Monday for media titans: Tucker Carlson split from Fox amid allegations from a former producer, Abby Grossberg, that the set of Tucker Carlson Tonight was a hostile workplace for women; Don Lemon was fired by CNN just weeks after declaring that the Republican primary candidate Nikki Haley was out of her “prime” at age 51; and Jeff Shell, the CEO of NBC Universal, was ousted because of what he characterized as an “inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company” and what Hadley Gamble, the woman in question, described as sexual harassment in a complaint filed with NBC prior to Shell’s dismissal. The housecleaning may not have been entirely prompted by matters related to women and sex, but the overall effect was nevertheless redolent of the high #MeToo era, when consequences for offenders first began to materialize.  

Nevertheless, a cynical observer might ask why, years after the advent of the #MeToo movement and the collapse of so many illustrious careers on ignoble grounds—even in this same industry—incidents like these keep revealing darkly retro workplace cultures. Is it bona fide #MeToo backlash, as commentators have worried in recent months, or a failure, as one friend worriedly confided in me on Monday, of the movement to radically transform that much at all? Neither, I would say: #MeToo is, and always has been, a power struggle; in many places throughout this industry and many others, it isn’t yet won. But episodes like these—daunting as their revelations are—nevertheless suggest that progress is still being made.

[Catharine A. MacKinnon: Where #MeToo came from, and where it’s going]

It’s worth conceiving of #MeToo as a struggle for power because this frame places appropriate emphasis on who is actually in control of workplace cultures and environments, versus a more limited view that imagines #MeToo as a collection of many different conflicts between many different individuals. Each of these instances matter—the personalities and experiences matter—but the systems of corporate hierarchy that allow high-ranking company players to victimize other employees are much more crucial to ongoing workplace toxicity than any one individual, or even all of the individuals combined. The pioneers of the #MeToo movement found their greatest success in looking beyond their immediate resources for justice—in going outside the systems that had disempowered them—to vindicate their rights.

For Harvey Weinstein’s victims, that meant taking their stories out of Hollywood and into the court of public opinion—and then the courts proper, as Weinstein was criminally prosecuted and convicted. For one of Roger Ailes’s many targets at Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, it meant escaping the forced-arbitration scheme that had kept Ailes’s egregious sexual harassment a networkwide secret by filing a lawsuit in open court, which Fox later settled. In each of these cases, the right to a better workplace was fought for and won through an exercise of greater power—typically in the courts, and often in full public view.

And those victories did come with lasting endowments. Last year, the Pew Research Center found that most Americans feel that #MeToo has made accountability for workplace sex discrimination likelier; when so much of a victim’s outcry is calculated on the likelihood of a favorable outcome, that kind of terrain-changing win is precious. And then there were the people all over the country who, inspired by the movement, organized under its auspices to take power: According to researchers at Georgetown University and the University of Oregon, “between 2017 and 2021, states introduced 2,324 #MeToo-related bills and passed 286.” There was less activity on the federal level, with the exception of the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harrassment Act and the Speak Out Act, both championed by Gretchen Carlson and signed by President Joe Biden (the former bill guarantees that a victim of sexual harassment or abuse can seek relief in court rather than through a secret arbitration process; the latter limits the use of nondisclosure agreements and nondisparagement clauses to silence victims).

[Read: When the White House is a safe space]

I was at the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing on November 16, 2021, the day that several women testified about their experiences with sexual harassment and forced arbitration in support of the then-pending Ending Forced Arbitration Act. I had the sense that something momentous was happening for American workers. An employer’s ability to trap an employee in a private court of their choosing with a mere contractual clause is—and was even more so, before the bill became law—a ready aid to exploitation. The women who testified that day all said as much, under oath and on the record. The result of the bill is that employees who are sexually harassed now have access to that much more power.

But the #MeToo tale has continued long after the initial success: No law and no regulation yet has been ambitious enough to solve the problem of rich and unaccountable men. Instead the struggle to work and to live like dignified people in a civilized society has been won by smaller shifts in power in lesser victories that are still being decided, even now.

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US president announces his re-election bid, likely pitting him against Donald Trump. 

The Republican plan for 2024 is already failing, and the party leadership can see it and knows it.

There was no secret to a more intelligent and intentional Republican plan for 2024. It would have gone like this:

1). Replace Donald Trump at the head of the ticket with somebody less obnoxious and impulsive.

2). Capitalize on inflation and other economic troubles.

3). Offer plausible ideas on drugs, crime, and border enforcement.

4). Reassure women worried about the post-Roe future.

5). Don’t be too obvious about suppressing Democratic votes, because really blatant voter suppression will provoke and mobilize Democrats to vote, not discourage them.

Unfortunately for them, Republicans have turned every element of the plan upside down and inside out. Despite lavish anti-Trump donations by big-money Republicans, Trump is cruising to easy renomination. Rather than capitalize on existing economic troubles, Republicans have started a debt-ceiling fight that will cast them as the cause of America’s economic troubles. Worse for them, the troubles are fast receding. Inflation is vexing, but the recession that Republicans hoped for did not materialize: Instead, Joe Biden has presided over the fastest and steepest unemployment reduction in U.S. economic history since he took office in January 2021.

[David Frum: Biden laid the trap. Trump walked into it.]

The big new Republican idea to halt the flow of drugs is to bomb or invade Mexico. Instead of reassuring women, Republican state legislators and Republican judges are signaling that they will support a national abortion ban if their party wins in 2024—and are already building the apparatus of surveillance and control of women necessary to make such a ban effective. Republican state-level voter-suppression schemes have been noisy and alarming when the GOP plan called for them to be subtle and technical.

It’s early in the election cycle, of course, but not too early to wonder: Are we watching a Republican electoral disaster in the making?

Biden’s poll numbers are only so-so. But a presidential election offers a stark and binary choice: this or that? Biden may fall short of some voters’ imagined ideal of a president, but in 2024, voters won’t be comparing the Democrat with that ideal. They will be comparing him with the Republican alternative.

An American must be at least 36 years old to have participated in an election in which the Republican candidate for president won the most votes. An American must be at least 52 years old to have participated in two presidential elections in which the Republican nominee got the most votes.

Despite this, over the past 30 years, the GOP has succeeded in leveraging its smaller share of the vote into a larger share of national power. That same 36-year-old American has lived half of his or her adult life under a Republican-controlled Senate, and even more of it under a Republican-majority House of Representatives. Through almost all of that American’s adult life, Republicans have held more than half of all state legislatures. Conservative dominance of the federal courts has become ever more total in the past two decades, culminating in the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

[Tom Nichols: Trump did it again]

Some of the Republicans’ leverage can be explained by the American electoral system’s tilt against metropolitan areas. Some of their success is due to luck. The GOP’s big year of 2010 also happened to be a redistricting year, so one successful election translated into a decade of more comprehensively gerrymandered state legislatures. (Democrats have not had a big win in a redistricting year since 1930.)

But the tilt is not infinite, and the party’s luck is running out. Republicans have suffered a series of heavy defeats since the rise of Trump: loss of the House in 2018, loss of the presidency in 2020, loss of the Senate in 2021, losses at the state level in 2022 (Democrats won net two governorships and net four legislative chambers).

Trump-era Republicans have difficulty absorbing and reacting to negative news. Led by Trump himself, they misrepresented 2016 as—in the words of his former adviser Kellyanne Conway—a blowout, historic landslide. They misrepresented 2020 as an election that they deservedly won, but that was stolen from them by fraud and chicanery. Out-of-office Republicans like Paul Ryan will acknowledge on CNN that Trump lost. But they won’t say it on Fox News. Trump’s own leading party rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, won’t say it. And if Trump is indeed the primary winner that he insists he is, what on Earth is the case for denying this political superstar the third nomination he wants?

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

The Democrats, by contrast, are a party that has trouble absorbing and reacting to good news. Few Democrats predicted that the party would do as well as it did in 2022. Most feel deep dread and anxiety about 2024.

Maybe it’s good to guard against complacency. The American electoral system’s tilt against Democratic-voting regions remains as pronounced as ever. The Senate map is especially unpromising for Democrats. Yet it’s also important to understand that although America is intensely and bitterly polarized, it is not evenly polarized.

The potential strength of the Democratic coalition is greater than that of the Trump coalition. The Democratic disadvantage is that their coalition spans a lot of groups that face extra difficulties casting a ballot: renters, college students, hourly workers, single parents, people who don’t own cars. The American voting system has been engineered to deter and discourage them.

If motivated to turn out, however, those deterred and discouraged blocs can swing elections. In 2018, 36 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds turned out, the highest level recorded. Their votes helped change control of the House. Turnout of this cohort in 2022 finished second only to what it had been in 2018, and those votes altered the political complexion of many state legislatures. The state that had the highest youth turnout in 2022 was Michigan—not so coincidentally, the state where Democrats scored some of their biggest gains, flipping both chambers of the state legislature from red to blue.

Chief among what motivates voters who face obstacles is hope. People will endure and overcome barriers when they feel that their vote can make a difference. If Democrats succeed in communicating hope in 2024 that young people can contribute to a decisive defeat of Trump and MAGA extremism, then that is what they will do.

[Peter Wehner: The institutional arsonist turns on his own party]

This cycle, that hope is well founded. Republicans are doing everything wrong. They are talking to their voters about Trump’s personal grievances and about boutique culture-war issues that their own base does not much care about, such as the state of Florida’s “war on Disney.” At the same time, Republican leaders are confronting Democratic voters with extremist threats on issues they care intensely about: bans on abortion medication by mail, restrictions on the freedom of young women to travel across state lines, attacks on student voting rights, proposed big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the GOP debt-ceiling ransom demand. Republicans offer no economic message and no affirming vision, even as they make new moves to police women’s bodies and start a land war in Mexico. They are well on their way to earning a deep, nasty defeat—and the smell of that defeat may be an additional draw to the polls for the Democratic-leaning constituencies that will inflict it.

Of all the major-party candidates to run for president since 2000, only one scored worse than Trump in the popular vote: John McCain in 2008. That was not a personal verdict on McCain. He was running for a third Republican term in the throes of the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression and against the backdrop of the most grinding military frustration since Vietnam.

Biden’s reelection-announcement video, released yesterday, defines the principal issue at stake in 2024 as “freedom.” From the New Deal to Trump, “freedom” was a Republican slogan; “security” was its Democratic counterpart. But Trump, together with DeSantis, has completely rebranded the GOP as the party of bossing around women, minorities, and young people.

If Trump secures the GOP nomination to run for a second term in 2024, the conditions are all in place to transfer the title of “worst popular-vote loser of the century” from the great Arizona senator to the putsch-plotting ex-president. Trump’s own party is doing its part to deliver this debacle. Soon enough, all Americans will have the opportunity to do theirs.

Voters have understandable hesitation about the Joe Biden’s age, but they ought to feel good about his accomplishments.