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.

Last month, General Motors announced that it would stop producing the Chevy Bolt, an electric hatchback known for its low price (under $20,000, after federal incentives) and modest size (about 3,600 pounds, or roughly half a Rivian R1T truck). Although the Bolt has been GM’s most popular EV, the company is retooling its factory to build electric pickups instead. The new Equinox EV, which will be about 21 inches longer, 500 pounds heavier, and at least $3,000 more expensive than the Bolt, will become GM’s entry-level electric model.

Americans considering a new electric vehicle can choose from an unprecedented array of options, but most of them lie on the spectrum between big and gigantic. Among the SUVs and trucks dominating carmakers’ growing EV lineups are the Cadillac Lyric (which weighs about 5,900 pounds), the Chevy Silverado EV (more than 8,000 pounds), and the GMC Hummer EV (more than 9,000 pounds). “If someone wants a small EV, it will be very difficult” to find one, Carla Bailo, the former CEO of the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research, told me.

Policy makers have high expectations for electric vehicles, which could help wean the American transportation system off fossil fuels. The Biden administration has announced several initiatives to accelerate the transition to EVs, in the name of fighting climate change and protecting autoworker jobs. Yet the relentless enlargement of American EVs is an ominous development for road safety, because added weight and height make cars more dangerous for anyone walking, biking, or inside smaller vehicles. Deaths among both pedestrians and cyclists recently reached 40-year highs in the U.S., and researchers have found vehicle size to be a cause. Bigger cars pose greater danger because of their height, which expands blind spots and makes the vehicle more likely to strike a person’s torso instead of their legs, and because of their weight, which adds force in a crash and elongates braking distances. Because of their large batteries, electric vehicles are about one-third heavier than equivalent gas-powered models.  

[Angie Schmitt: Big cars are killing Americans]

Unfortunately, few shoppers consider risks to nonpassengers when selecting their next car, and electrification-enthused federal officials have avoided acknowledging the obvious risks of oversize EVs, let alone proposing solutions. Unless that changes, the electrified future of American cars is poised to be a deadly one.

As I wrote in The Atlantic in January, automakers’ push for ever-larger EVs echoes their strategy with gas-powered models. When Sergio Marchionne, the late Fiat Chrysler CEO, nixed all of Chrysler’s sedans in 2016, he set an example for the rest of the U.S. auto industry, which would rather make large, highly profitable SUVs and trucks than cheap mass-market cars. Four out of every five new vehicles sold in the U.S. are either SUVs or trucks, which are themselves gaining inches and pounds relative to comparable vehicles in the recent past.

These trends have boosted automakers’ bottom line. “A small car can get you profit margins of 2 to 3 percent, max. But with trucks and SUVs, you can get 20 to 30 percent profit,” Bailo said. “You can put in a large battery, take the profit down to 8 percent, and you’re still looking pretty good.”  Of the 23 EVs introduced over the past two years, 17 are SUVs, and all but four have a starting price of more than $45,000. Meanwhile, potential buyers seeking a smaller electric car for less than $35,000 are down to the Nissan Leaf and the Hyundai Kona.

Automakers offer an intuitive response when asked how their hefty EV lineups affect road safety: They are merely providing the big cars that Americans want, only now in a climate-friendly format. After all, consumer spending has been moving toward larger models for decades. “Over the years, policymakers would often ask: ‘When are we going to see a broader set of offerings in the #electricvehicle space? When are we going to see SUVs? When are we going to see pickup trucks?” John Bozzella, the CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, wrote earlier this year on LinkedIn. “Here. We. Are.”

But car executives are hardly passive bystanders in that shift. This is an industry that invests billions of dollars annually in advertising—much of it now touting the style, performance, and supposed greenness of the biggest EV models. Never mind that the environmental benefits of electric SUVs and trucks are dubious at best. Manufacturing large batteries entails more extraction of minerals like lithium and cobalt, while charging them requires additional electricity. Their extra weight also generates more particulate emissions from brake pads and tires.

Under current market conditions, it’s unclear how or if the trend toward EV enormity will end.  Electricity—unlike gasoline—seldom undergoes price swings that might send buyers rushing toward smaller models (as happened with conventional cars during the oil crises of the 1970s). Profit-minded automakers have little reason to change course, and Americans aren’t forcing them to.The trend has become self-amplifying. The decision of some drivers to purchase large vehicles pushes everyone else to do the same. Consumers face a prisoner’s dilemma: The choices they make in protecting their individual interest (in this case, by buying a bigger car) end up leaving everyone worse off (by making collisions more dangerous, and by increasing the cost of a new vehicle).  

Only one force in the United States—the federal government—can halt the growth in EVs’ size and weight.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, could revise its emissions standards to consider not just tailpipe emissions (which EVs do not produce) but also pollutants from charging electric batteries, which scale with vehicle size. “If all EVs are treated as having no emissions, carmakers could meet EPA rules by selling big EVs,” Peter Huether, a senior research associate at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, told me. “But if upstream emissions are included, there is an incentive to sell more efficient EVs.”

Alternatively, Congress could follow Norway’s lead and affix a weight-based tax to the heaviest cars—however they are powered—thereby nudging buyers toward smaller, lighter models. And it could require buyers of the most egregiously oversize vehicles, such as the 26,000-pound Ford F-650 recently acquired by the University of Colorado football coach Deion Sanders, to obtain commercial driver’s licenses.

[David Zipper: Electric vehicles are bringing out the worst in us]

The feds can also tackle car-safety regulations directly through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a division of the Department of Transportation. NHTSA recently proposed new crash tests that would for the first time evaluate the danger that a vehicle’s design poses to pedestrians (other countries adopted such tests many years ago). But even if models’ pedestrian-crash-test ratings are shared at dealerships (and it isn’t clear that they would be), they are merely an educational tool. Yesterday, NHTSA suggested adjusting the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards to require that new cars be equipped with automatic emergency-braking systems that detect pedestrians, but the new rule will take at least four years to go into effect. Moreover, unlike vehicle-size restrictions, which the highway-safety agency has consistently declined to pursue, the proposed emergency braking will not protect cyclists—and will provide minimal value to pedestrians if the vehicle is traveling above 40 miles per hour.

The DOT spokesperson Dani Simons defended the agency’s response to expanding vehicle size by noting the complexity of the federal regulatory process. “You need to be extremely precise,” she told me. “If NHTSA does a rule-making, they have to set some kind of cutoff, like saying that cars 10,001 pounds and over are dangerous, but those below that are okay. You'll need some way to be able to measure and enforce it, and you have to have research to defend it.” Mark Rosekind, who led NHTSA during the Obama administration, also counseled patience. “The problem from the federal side is that a big ship can take a long time to change direction,” he told me.

Putting aside byzantine federal regulatory processes, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—the most visible and media-savvy occupant of the position in recent memory—could still do far more to draw attention to the problem. The agency can hold open forums exploring the crash risks of EVs, publish reports highlighting safety problems with larger cars, and send public letters to automakers inquiring about their plans to offer Americans the option of buying smaller EV models. None of this seems to be happening.

By setting a goal that half of all new car sales be electric by 2030 and vowing to end the federal purchase of gas-powered cars by 2035, the Biden administration has gone all in on electrification. The White House would much rather talk about EVs’ ability to create jobs than their potential to worsen the road-safety crisis. And because SUVs and trucks dominate American car sales, anything perceived as criticism of those vehicles risks alienating drivers while antagonizing carmakers and the United Auto Workers union (a key Democratic constituency in swing states).

Instead of raising concerns about larger models, President Joe Biden has embraced the very embodiment of EV bloat: the Goliath-like GMC Hummer EV, whose battery alone weighs more than a Honda Civic. Biden took a joyride in an electric Hummer in 2021, which GM credited for boosting preorders. In January, the president tweeted a picture of himself inside one while touting new federal rebates—even though the 2023 Hummer EV’s suggested price, which starts at $87,000, makes it too expensive to qualify for them.

The tension between EV size and road safety is an awkward one for Buttigieg, whose National Roadway Safety Strategy commits the federal government to a goal of zero traffic deaths, but who frequently touts the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for car electrification. In a February interview in Fast Company, Buttigieg was asked how regulations could address the danger that trucks and SUVs pose to pedestrians. He punted: “I think it’s important to do further research to look at how all the different trends in how vehicles are designed—their size, or composition, their weight, their proportions, even their shape—can affect safety.”

That’s an excuse. Ample research already ties vehicle size to the rising number of crash deaths in the U.S. (a trend that other rich countries are not experiencing). Politics seems to be preventing Buttigieg from admitting what others, including National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy, have been saying with growing urgency: America’s penchant for big cars is killing people, and electrification could exacerbate the problem.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that state and city officials are not under the same political constraints as the Biden administration. Although creativity is required, they can adopt their own policies to counteract EVs’ expanding size. Some of them already are.

The District of Columbia, for instance, recently revamped its vehicle-registration program to charge those owning most cars weighing more than 6,000 pounds $500 a year, seven times more than owners of small sedans. ( D.C. made one notable concession to EVs’ battery weight: They can weigh up to 7,000 pounds before the $500 fee kicks in.) A recent bill proposed in California’s legislature suggests a similar change. Another novel approach comes from Colorado, where new legislation would provide a $2,500 subsidy to those buying EVs with suggested retail prices below $35,000—a threshold that would exclude all but the most modest models.

As admirable as these state and local efforts are, their reach will be limited. In the 1960s, Congress decided that the federal government itself would oversee automotive safety. (Ironically, that move was taken in part to address the concern, raised in Ralph Nader’s classic book Unsafe at Any Speed, that car companies wielded excessive influence in statehouses.)

A serious response to EV bloat requires robust federal action, but little evidence suggests that it’s coming. Instead, GM’s decision to convert its Chevy Bolt plant to produce pickup trucks seems like a harbinger of deadly crashes ahead. Brace yourself.

Lucas Peilert contributed research to this article.