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.

A small flock of drones descends on Moscow; Russian rebels raid over the border into their estranged motherland, mysterious fires break out in Russian cities, oil-storage depots experience explosions, and Russian trains suffer an unusual number of derailments. How does the White House react? “As a general matter, we do not support attacks inside of Russia.”

This is an administration that has done some things very well, including blowing the whistle on Russian invasion plans and building a coalition to support Ukraine. It has done other things moderately well: giving the Ukrainians high-end weapons, though only after repeated agonizing, delaying, and prevaricating. However, it often undermines its cause with speech that is strategically witless. Sometimes, this takes the form of leaks from officials to friendly journalists, who then report the officials’ fears of Russian escalation, hopes for negotiations, and doubts about Ukrainian abilities. More commonly, it appears in an unwillingness to say the obvious, which is that we want Ukraine to defeat Russian armies thoroughly and drive them from all of its territory.

And then there is this inane comment. It is politically dumb because it signals divisions between us and the Ukrainians, it casts a chill on European politicians (some more timid than ours), and it encourages Russian propagandists to go into fits of menacing fury that never amount to anything beyond the crimes their soldiers normally commit, but can still cause the blood to drain from a few pallid faces.

[Kori Schake: Biden is more fearful than the Ukrainians are]

The statement is, from a military historian’s point of view, ignorant of war to the point of illiteracy. What country has ever won a war by confining itself to homeland defense even when it was capable of much more? Ukraine was attacked in an extraordinarily brutal and unprovoked way; why should it not hit back? After December 7, 1941, did the United States limit itself to looking for the aircraft carriers that conducted the Pearl Harbor operation?

The comment is also operationally obtuse. Ukrainian raids into Russia demoralize its public (we know that from monitoring Russian Telegram channels) and divert Russian resources and attention away from the front lines. The more Russian troops guard the border, the fewer dig in outside Melitopol. The more resources diverted into missile and air defense, the less there are to support the occupying army. The more humiliating gaps there appear in the defenses of Moscow, the greater the likelihood of a regime that will claw at itself, as the likes of Yevgeny Prigozhin use this as a crowbar with which to torment their internal rivals.

Above all, the White House statement, and the undeniable angst that accompanies it, reflects two regrettable but common American flaws: naivete and arrogance. During a century and a half, the United States has witnessed only two substantial attacks on its territory, in 1941 and again in 2001. Both were one-off affairs. We have difficulty imagining what it would be like to have missiles rain down on our cities, smashing hospitals and schools, or to endure the wanton slaughter and rape of an invading army. Americans would not show anything like the restraint asked of Ukraine were something even remotely similar to befall not only Washington, but New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Miami. And if anyone asked them to do so, the responses would be short, sharp, and unprintable.

There is conceit here as well—the conceit of an exceptionally powerful country, to be sure, but one whose leaders have convinced themselves that they are expert on the processes of war. Biden-administration officials still insist that our flight from Afghanistan was a masterly move, executed in a masterly fashion. Worse yet, they believe it. They believe that they have titrated the flow of weapons to Ukraine in just the right quantities and amounts. They believe that they can control war, whose ends are driven by politics but whose means often take statesmen down unpredicted and unmarked paths.

Off the record, senior officials sometimes betray condescension toward minor powers—those brave but primitive Ukrainians, those feisty but irresponsible Poles, those endangered but deeply neurotic Balts—with whom they have imperfect empathy and to whom they give less respect than is their due. Some of that is in this statement, as it is in the patronizing assessments of Ukrainian warcraft compared with our own.

These officials would do better to recall that the United States lost the Vietnam and Afghan Wars, and, at best, pulled off far-too-costly draws in Iraq and Korea. They would do better, as well, to take a long pause to reflect on just how profoundly mistaken they were not only about the Ukrainian will to fight, but about Ukraine’s capacity to absorb modern weapons and defeat Russian forces. And they also might find it helpful to remember the failures of American statecraft in Syria and in Ukraine in 2014 that laid the groundwork for this war.

[Read: How Syria came to this]

Individually, those who issue statements such as the White House’s and share this approach to policy are (mostly) nice, decent people. They have, by and large, elegant educations at elite institutions; they are comfortable at meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and have résumés of unusual academic or legal distinction. But there are things more easily learned in bar fights or repeated bouts with boxing gloves or pugil sticks (let alone infantry combat) than in lecture halls and seminar rooms. War is an elemental activity; it needs often to be waged in an elemental way, and it has to be understood with the viscera and not just the head.

The maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect, as the great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz observed. There is every reason to think that the Ukrainians are not merely lashing out (although there is probably some of that) but that these attacks on Russia are part of a larger preparation for the offensives on which their country’s future depends. They are distracting, demoralizing, and unbalancing their enemy. That is wise, because at the end of the day their resources, even with our help, are limited.

Still, a press spokesperson has to reply to a journalist’s question. So, too, for that matter, does a senior official caught at a fancy Washington dinner. There is a ready response.

In February 1946, shortly before giving his famous Iron Curtain speech, Winston Churchill was asked a question he did not wish to answer as he left Washington for Miami. “No comment,” he replied. “I think ‘No comment’ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.” An honorable if not a modest man, he thanked former Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles for teaching him its use and encouraging its application.

Reticence is one of the minor strategic virtues. The administration has, it bears repeating, done many of the right things. For whatever reason, Churchillian rhetoric is beyond it. Churchillian warcraft also seems a quality beyond its understanding or aspirations. But at the very least, it would do well to emulate Churchillian discretion as the next round of Ukrainian blows fall on their pitiless and brutal enemies.