For a brief moment, it looked like America could get a real child-care system—one that wasn’t defined by lengthy waitlists, sky-high fees, and crossed-fingers quality. When the House of Representatives passed the Build Back Better Act in 2021, it included $400 billion in funding, part of which would have paid programs enough to boost providers’ wages, in turn increasing the supply of available slots. The act also would have capped all but the wealthiest families’ child-care bills at 7 percent of their income. This overhaul would have put child care squarely in the same category as Social Security, Medicare, and other guaranteed supports: It would have, in other words, become a right. Since Joe Manchin and 50 Republican senators killed the bill, however, many policy makers have started following a tired old playbook: If at first you fail to make something a universal right, try making it an employee benefit.

The instinct to make for any policy port in a storm is understandable, and the American child-care system is stuck in a years-long hurricane. At its core is a financial paradox. Child-care providers have very high fixed costs due to the need for low child-to-adult ratios, so they can’t pay their staff well without significantly increasing parent fees (many child-care workers make less than parking attendants). In other words, child care simultaneously is too expensive for parents and brings in too little revenue for programs to operate sustainably. In fact, the industry is still down more than 50,000 employees from pre-pandemic levels. Centers have shut down for want of staff, long waitlists have stretched to the point of absurdity, and the rising cost of care continues to exceed inflation.

The system desperately needs a large infusion of permanent public money so that programs can compensate educators well, parent fees can be slashed, and supply can rise to meet demand. As Annie Lowrey wrote last year, “The math does not work. It will never work. No other country makes it work without a major investment from government.”

[Read: The reason child care is so hard to afford]

In his public remarks and his proposed budget for the 2024 fiscal year, President Joe Biden is certainly insistent about the need for a permanent answer to child-care funding. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Patty Murray, along with their House counterparts, have each submitted a major child-care bill in recent months. Yet in the face of congressional gridlock, Democrats and Republicans alike are turning to employers as a salve.

At the federal level, the Biden administration is nudging companies to offer employees child-care assistance, embedding such encouragement in the semiconductor CHIPS Act and a recent executive order on care. Red states such as Oklahoma and Missouri have proposed—along with other actions, like tax credits for donors to child-care programs—sweetening the incentive pot for employer child-care benefits. States such as Michigan and Kentucky are piloting programs in which child-care costs can be split among the employer, the employee, and the government.

The problem is that these are quarter measures at best. Millions of gig workers who don’t receive benefits will be left out by default. And employer-sponsored benefits are unreliable because people may switch or lose their job—and because employers can simply change their mind. According to a recent Care.com survey of 500 companies, nearly one-third said they might cut child-care benefits if a recession takes hold. Even putting all of that aside, none of these programs can ever hope to help even the barest fraction of the millions of families who want and need care.

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

For instance, two years after its inception, Michigan’s well-intentioned Tri-Share initiative reaches a grand total of 277 families. On-site child-care centers can quickly fill up and may not meet the needs or preferences of blue-collar workers who require care during nontraditional hours. Moreover, none of these initiatives significantly addresses providers’ wages, and opening new programs when you can’t even find staff for existing ones is a bridge to nowhere. A child-care system that relies on the employer-employee relationship is fundamentally flawed. There is a reason we do not offer public schooling as part of a benefits package.

That is not to say that employers should be ignored. Some parents benefit greatly from having child care located where they work. However, those programs do not have to be funded and run by the employer; in a publicly funded system, on-site centers can be one option among many. Similarly, employers can and should be asked to contribute to the child care their employees rely on, but through taxation instead of fringe benefits. Vermont is set to become the first state to substantially increase child-care funding with a small payroll tax, at least 75 percent of which will be paid by employers. The resulting funds will allow the state to make many more families eligible for child-care assistance and help providers raise their wages.

We’ve been at this crossroads before, with health care. During World War II, companies began offering health insurance as a perk. This was done to get around wage caps established in 1942 to prevent the economy from going haywire as companies competed for the suddenly shrunken labor force. Coming out of the war, President Harry Truman proposed a national health-insurance system akin to what would become the U.K.’s National Health Service. The plan failed under opposition not just from business interests but from several major labor unions that had become invested in the idea of employer-sponsored insurance—a decision whose effects the country still feels today.

Child care itself serves up a cautionary tale. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, a wide-ranging coalition of advocates and elected officials pushed for a universal, affordable, choice-based child-care system. Their efforts culminated in the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have created a nationally funded, locally run network of child-care sites. The legislation passed Congress on a bipartisan basis before President Richard Nixon vetoed it. Soon thereafter, the coalition splintered. The historian Anna Danziger Halperin has written that, “following this narrowing of political possibilities and shift of the policy landscape to the right, by the 1980s advocates … no longer pressured policymakers for universal approaches. Instead they focused on more limited provisions, like tax incentives for employers to provide child care.”

The logic behind leaning on employer-sponsored child care is easy: Something is better than nothing. Yet this is not always the case, in life or in public policy. In the middle of a hurricane, handing out umbrellas is a waste of time and energy. As America learned with health care, if we get used to a service being tied to employment, that idea can become entrenched and very hard to change. Today’s stopgap measures become tomorrow’s status quo. Marching down such a path will make it even harder to gain the momentum needed to build and fund a child-care system that works for everyone.

Part of the difficulty in gathering that momentum is the lack of a popular child-care proposal that captures the public imagination. Murray’s plan has the most support within the Democratic Party and formed the basis for the Build Back Better child-care provisions. Although transformational, the bill uses a complicated income-based sliding fee scale and a bureaucratic “activity test” whereby parents must prove they are engaged in work or school, or have a legitimate reason not to be. One would be hard-pressed to summarize either Murray’s or Warren’s plan in a sentence, much less a viral sound bite.

The time and energy spent promoting employee child-care benefits, then, would be better spent developing a simply communicated, comprehensive reform plan. To maximize its popularity, such a plan should help with the early years as well as after-school and summer care, and follow the lead of some Nordic countries with stipends for stay-at-home parents. The simplest, strongest plan to capture the public's attention could be to mimic the public-school system, and propose universal and free child care. Ideally, any plan would be tied into a suite of pro-family policies that includes paid family leave and a monthly allowance for helping with general child-rearing costs. There is significant political upside to getting this right: The child-care pain point is deep and broad, and fixing child care is an astoundingly popular policy area that could be put front and center in a campaign.

The miserable state of American child care is not a given. In the past 30 years, Germany, Canada, Ireland and other peer nations with market-based child-care systems have undergone tremendous reforms. Canada aims to halve child-care fees nationwide, and some families have already seen their bills reduced by thousands of dollars. Within the U.S., in addition to Vermont’s recent victory, New Mexico is proposing to make child care free for most families while boosting educator wages. The common thread? Large amounts of permanent public money.

In the end, the country must decide what child care is: a right that every family deserves and that is worth investing in, or a luxury to be purchased by those with means and bestowed upon a lucky few at their employers’ whim.

Almost exactly six years ago, James Comey begot a new mantra for the Trump era: “Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” In most cases, none has emerged: not of the former FBI director’s conversation with Donald Trump about loyalty, not of the fateful call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and not, well, that other fabled tape.

In the ongoing classified-documents scandal, though, the tapes seem to exist. CNN and The New York Times report that Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump’s removal of secret records to Mar-a-Lago, has obtained a recording in which the former president discussed his possession of a sensitive document. According to the outlets, Trump indicates that he knows it’s classified and is aware he cannot share it.

The content of the tape is important for any prosecution of Trump, which would have to prove he knew that what he was doing was wrong. But the circumstances of the recording are also revealing about how Trump operates, and the way he seems to understand bad press as a graver threat than criminal prosecution.

[Read: Donald Trump and the currency of tapes]

No dispute exists over whether Trump took boxes of documents with him from the White House. The question is whether they were classified and public records, or declassified and his personal property. Trump has asserted publicly—though his attorneys have conspicuously avoided doing so in legal filings—that he declassified all of the materials before leaving office, without providing any evidence for the claim. Audio proof that Trump understood that at least one document was still secret would demolish that defense.

Given that mishandling of classified materials by former officials is apparently common, Smith appears to also be focusing on whether Trump attempted to hide the documents from the federal government once they were requested and then subpoenaed. Reports indicate that Trump had boxes moved to hide them and lied to his attorneys about the material, and an aide allegedly inquired about how long surveillance video was maintained. (Lordy, maybe there are lots of tapes.)

Aside from the egregious violation of the Stringer Bell rule—or perhaps just the Richard Nixon rule—that recording evidence of one’s own criminality represents, the tape would demonstrate yet again Trump’s reckless disregard for the law. Consider the circumstances for the recording. In July 2021, two writers working with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on his autobiography interviewed Trump at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club. Meadows was not present. (Suffice it to say that this is not how Bob Haldeman or Ulysses S. Grant wrote their memoirs.)

Trump was, as usual, in a score-settling mood. A recent New Yorker report had claimed that in the final days of his administration, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had taken steps to prevent Trump from ordering a strike on Iran. The story was opaque on its sourcing, but it narrated events from Milley’s own perspective. Trump, who likes to portray himself as a dovish, isolationist opponent of warmongering generals, was furious. At the meeting with the two writers, Trump brandished a report that he claimed was Milley’s plan for an assault on Iran, and said that the general had repeatedly urged him to mount an attack. He can apparently be heard waving the papers on the recording. Neither CNN nor The New York Times heard the audio, but it was described to reporters at both outlets by multiple sources.

But Trump was reluctant to show the memoir writers the actual document, according to the reports, because he knew it was still classified and they did not have security clearances. He may not have always been so fastidious. Smith is reportedly also investigating whether Trump showed several visitors a classified map.

The recording that Smith has obtained was reportedly made not by the writers but by Margo Martin, a Trump aide who “​​routinely taped the interviews he gave for books being written about him that year,” according to the Times. The former president was apparently worried about being misrepresented or misquoted.

To summarize: Trump’s fear of damaging press—whether in the Milley reports or the Meadows book—was so much greater than his fear of criminal accountability that he ended up making an incriminating recording that could be a key piece of his own prosecution.

[Adam Serwer: Trump’s inner circle keeps violating the Stringer Bell rule]

Throughout his career, Trump has behaved as a person who sees image as more important than law. It’s an outlook that seems to stem not only from his inherent disdain for rule of law and love of publicity, but also from a calculation that when the two conflict, image will triumph. Over and over, he’s managed to wriggle out of potential legal jams with bluster, brazenness, and the occasional large check. That worked when he was president, too, escaping serious consequences from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and his first impeachment by rallying political support. It was not enough to prevent his loss in the 2020 presidential election, but it helped him avoid conviction in his second impeachment.

Trump is still at it. No matter how damning the evidence that Smith is able to assemble, Trump is seeking to bully the Justice Department out of charging him. If that doesn’t work, he hopes to be reelected to the presidency in November 2024, which would allow him to shut down any investigation or prosecution against him, or to pardon himself. It might yet work.

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.