Every successful politician follows roughly the same path: First, they become prominent on some stage. They become more successful, maybe graduating to a larger stage. Then, eventually, they peak and decline, with the affection of even their strongest supporters cooling somewhat.

If they are lucky (Harry Truman, George H. W. Bush), they eventually experience some historical revision that burnishes their reputation. (If they are very lucky, they even live to see it.) If they are not (Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon), they don’t. This happens whether a politician’s departure from office comes in defeat at the polls or at the top of their popularity, as with Bill Clinton, who has seen his reputation suffer—personally and politically—in the past 15 years.

Along with election results and norms of basic decency, Donald Trump continues to defy this pattern. Not only was the former president nationally famous before he entered politics, but he has always been unpopular with most Americans and very popular with his base. From early in his presidency through to the present, nothing has changed the fundamental picture. That stability is now the key to understanding the 2024 Republican nomination race.

[David A. Graham: The Republican primary’s Trump paradox]

The prospect of a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden has demoralized and baffled commentators. “Not Biden vs. Trump Again!” moaned a recent headline on the political-science site Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “It won’t be pretty. It may not be inspiring. And it will mostly be about which candidate you dislike more,” warned Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times. “How did a once-great nation end up facing an election between two very old, very unpopular White dudes?” groaned The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle.

The answer in Biden’s case is relatively straightforward: Incumbent presidents basically never lose the nomination (though shockingly high polling for known crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. illustrates the dissatisfaction among Democratic voters). Trump is a more interesting case, because he is not president, has never successfully won the popular vote, and lost the previous election—to say nothing of his attempt to steal the election afterward.

These are the ingredients for a politician to lose his support and slink from the scene. No popular groundswell demanded that Gerald Ford run in 1980, nor Bush in 1996; only inveterate op-ed-page contrarians such as Doug Schoen clamored for Hillary Clinton to run again in 2020 (or 2024, for that matter).

Yet Trump hasn’t lost luster, partly because he never had much luster to begin with. Since March 2017, with a brief exception, more than half of Americans have disapproved of Trump (during his presidency) or held an unfavorable opinion of him (since he left office), according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll averages. (He very briefly dipped into mere plurality disapproval early in the coronavirus pandemic.)

One half of the equation is that it’s hard to become unpopular when you were already there. The other half is that it’s hard to become more unpopular when your supporters are so devoted. In a recent YouGov/Economist poll, 84 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of Trump; Quinnipiac pegged the number at 86 percent.

This kind of split might have been impossible in past decades, because it would have spelled electoral doom: To win the nomination in politically heterogeneous parties, a candidate had to appeal broadly. But in today’s ideologically sorted and affectively polarized parties, a candidate can win the nomination and then rely on their party’s voters to coalesce around them and guarantee 47 to 49 percent of the vote. (Of course, it’s that last little increment to a majority or plurality that makes all the difference in the end.)

Ron DeSantis only formally entered the race in May, but he appears to be sputtering. At the same time, the primary is expanding, as more Republicans enter the race or seriously consider it. One explanation for this is that DeSantis just hasn’t been a very good candidate: He looks clumsy and leaden on the trail, and he’s failed to differentiate himself from Trump in a way that appeals to enough voters. That’s encouraged other Republicans to make a plan for the mantle of Trump alternative.

But the problem facing either DeSantis or any of the others is not that the right Trump alternative hasn’t emerged but that most Republicans don’t want a Trump alternative. They want Trump. The depth of affection for Trump is appalling, given that his first term in office was morally and practically disastrous and ended with an attempt to steal the election and an exhortation to sack the U.S. Capitol. But Republicans continue to love him; it’s not debatable.

DeSantis, cautiously, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, more Christiely, have tried to get around this by arguing that Trump is a loser: He lost in 2020, he led the party to losses in 2018 and 2022, and he barely avoided losing in 2016. This is a tricky balance to strike, because it requires convincing Republican voters that the guy they voted for twice, and whom they still like, is a loser—especially compared with Christie, who lost badly to Trump in 2016, and DeSantis, who is losing badly to Trump this time. The easy retort is the same one for Bernie-would-have-won types after 2016: If he would have won, then why didn’t he? In this case, why aren’t you winning now?

More important, this argument will fail to convince Trump supporters because they believe he’s actually the most electable candidate. A Monmouth poll released Tuesday finds that almost two-thirds of Republicans think the former president is definitely or probably the candidate best positioned to defeat Biden. Trump critics will scoff at this, but then again, Trump’s victory in 2016 is proof that unpopularity isn’t politically fatal.

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As my colleague Matteo Wong noted earlier this month, a hotter-than-usual summer may await many Americans. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s temperature and precipitation outlook for June through August shows a significant chance of above-normal temperatures across much of the country. I spoke with NOAA experts about how these predictions are made, what to expect in the weeks and months to come, and how to stay safe in extreme heat.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The DEI industry needs to check its privilege. The indignity of grocery shopping Semi-retirees know the key to work-life balance. Above Normal

What kind of summer do we potentially have in store in the United States? How should Americans interpret these weather predictions?

Johnna M. Infanti, a scientist at NOAA who was the forecaster for the June-July-August Climate Prediction Center outlook released this past month, told me that “generally, what we’re seeing is a pattern that favors above-normal temperatures for much of the country. But our outlooks really speak to the probability that the average temperature will be above normal. It doesn’t really indicate whether or not these temperatures will be extreme or set any records.”

“We take the average of temperatures for the June-July-August period from 1991 to 2020, and our models give us an indication of whether we should expect the upcoming summer to be warmer or cooler or dryer or wetter than the average,” she explained.

Morgan Zabow, the community heat and health information coordinator at NOAA, added that the likelihood of above-normal temperatures is expressed in percentages, which doesn’t tell us exactly what temperatures to expect but gives us an idea of what could be coming in different geographical areas.

“A temperature outlook like this really helps your decision makers—your city planners, your public-health officials, emergency responders—be a little bit more aware of what this could mean,” Zabow told me. “An increased risk of heat-related illnesses and deaths that disproportionately affect children under 5 and older adults, people experiencing homelessness, athletes, and so many other populations.”

So how do these predictions get made?

Infanti told me that her team uses dynamical climate models—“basically, computer models of what we might expect in the upcoming season based on the current state of the atmosphere, land, and ocean. They then show predictions for the temperature and precipitation for the next season.”

“We also look at things like long-term decadal trends,” she said. “For example, if a region has seen increasing temperatures over the last 10 years, that’s something we would take into consideration. We’d also look at sea-surface temperatures, both along the coast and globally if there’s something like an El Niño happening.”

How much of a role will El Niño play in shaping the climate of the coming months?

First, an explanation of how the phenomenon works: “El Niño and La Niña are opposite phases of a natural climate pattern across the tropical Pacific Ocean,” Infanti said. “And that natural climate pattern swings back and forth every three to seven years on average. We just ended a period of La Niña in the tropical Pacific, which means cooler-than-average temperatures across the tropical Pacific.”

Next, Infanti and her colleagues predict that we will enter an El Niño phase, “which means that the conditions in the tropical Pacific are favorable for the development of El Niño conditions within the next few months, bringing warmer-than-average tropical Pacific sea-surface temperatures that can cause local changes in convection patterns over that region. And that sets off a kind of a chain reaction—we call them teleconnections—across most of the globe. But we wouldn’t see related weather effects in the U.S. until the wintertime.”

Back to those above-normal temperatures: How does climate change factor into volatile weather patterns?

“With climate change, we’re seeing heat waves that are occurring more frequently. They’re more intense, and they’re also lasting longer, plus the heat-wave season is increasing,” Zabow said. “A heat-wave season could have typically been just during the summer months, but now we’re starting to see it before the typical summer months and after what people would consider summer months too.”

What can people do to keep cool and safe?

“Extreme heat events can be very deadly, especially at the beginning of the heat season, because people aren’t acclimated to the heat yet,” Zabow told me. “It’s important to note, though, that heat-related illnesses and deaths are largely preventable. It’s about taking simple measures, such as wearing a hat when you’re outside or wearing light-colored clothing to reflect some of the heat, making sure that you are staying inside in a space that has access to air-conditioning.”

If you don’t have access to air-conditioning at home, Zabow recommends finding a cooling center—you might try a local mall or library, or a special designated cooling center in your area. She encourages Americans to check out heat.gov for more guidance on what to do before, during, and after heat waves.

Related:

Nowhere should expect a cool summer. Why California can’t catch a break Today’s News House members will vote on the bipartisan debt-limit deal this evening. A new study shows that Earth has entered danger zones for seven out of eight scientifically established safety limits. A federal appeals-court panel ruled that the Sackler family will receive full immunity from current and future civil legal claims regarding their role in Purdue Pharma’s prescription-opioid business. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: The one thing holding back the mass adoption of electric cars in America isn’t the cars themselves, Patrick George writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ thoughts on Ron DeSantis’s run for the 2024 GOP nomination.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Kevin Mazur / TAS23 / Getty

Fans’ Expectations of Taylor Swift Are Chafing Against Reality

By Spencer Kornhaber

Three songs have been playing every night before Taylor Swift has taken the stage on her current tour, and each one seems to convey a different message. One track is Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” a classic assertion of female independence. Another is Lady Gaga’s “Applause,” a pump-up jam in which a celebrity confesses her hunger for approval. Then there’s Ice Spice’s “In Ha Mood,” a recent hip-hop song whose presence shows, among other things, that Swift is paying attention to what’s hot in pop culture—an important fact to keep in mind when evaluating the controversy now brewing around her.

Ice Spice is a 23-year-old Bronx emcee whose whispery voice and puff of red hair have become internationally famous in a very short span of time, following the TikTok success of her August 2022 single “Munch (Feelin’ U).” She features on the new remix of Swift’s track “Karma,” released last week, and this past weekend she joined Swift to perform the song at the singer’s three concerts in New Jersey. From a distance, the story feels familiar: Established star allies with rising star for mutual benefit. But the remix has unleashed a wave of indignation online, making Swift, not for the first time, a focal point for conflicting attitudes about what entertainers owe their audience.

Read the full article.

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Read. “Near Darwin,” a new poem by Carl Dennis.

“Why turn from the table / To write a lament on the power of time / To undermine human effort when he can describe / How the work of worms helps sustain us?”

Watch. Happy Valley (on AMC+ and BBC America), which, according to our Culture writer, features the most compelling female character on television.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

When we discussed the long-term temperature impact of climate change, Zabow, the NOAA heat and health information coordinator, pointed me to Climate Explorer, a web tool hosted by the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center. “You’re able to type in any county in the United States and see what the historical average temperatures were in the area, and then what the projections are,” she told me. “You could see how hot your neighborhood might be by 2050, or by 2090, depending on whether or not we implement emissions-reducing measures.” It’s a sobering yet useful climate-reality check.

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.