It’s as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral.

Who believes that Governor Ron DeSantis—so badly trailing in the polls behind former President Donald Trump—is genuinely upset by his rival’s federal indictment? Or that Speaker Kevin McCarthy—so disgusted by Trump in private—does not inwardly rejoice to see Trump meet justice?

The Fox News talkers have been trying for months to sideline Trump and promote DeSantis. Now they have a turn of events that promises both to help their corporate political agenda and to stoke controversy and ratings. They must be positively ecstatic at the network’s New York headquarters today.

So many in the Republican and conservative world wish Trump off the stage. So few possess the courage or integrity to say so aloud.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

Special Counsel Jack Smith now presents them with an opportunity—if they can find their way past a hitherto intractable, and perhaps still unsolvable, problem of collective action.

If you are DeSantis, here’s what you want to see happen:

Trump is indicted, prosecuted, convicted, and thereby banished from public life. You champion Trump every step of the way, acting as his fiercest and loudest ally. To your pretend regret, your Trump advocacy fails to shield Trump from the law. Trump is removed from the path to office; you inherit all of Trump’s supporters.

Kevin McCarthy and the Fox News talkers share similar interests and goals.

But here’s the intractable collective-action problem: These plans depend on the non-Trump political actors performing just convincingly enough that their audience is deceived, but not so convincingly that their audience is mobilized to actually do something inconvenient about it. That undesirable something might be some kind of mass protest or even violence. Or possibly it would take the form of conservative voters losing faith in the system and withdrawing from voting and political participation altogether.

The conservative world in the age of Trump has coiled itself into a labyrinth of lies: lies about Trump’s victimhood, lies about Trump’s popularity, lies about Trump’s election outcomes, lies about Trump’s mental acuity and physical strength. The architects of the labyrinth presumed that they could always, if necessary, find an exit—and that their keys could someday turn the exit’s locks. Instead, they have found themselves as lost and trapped in the labyrinth as the deceived people they lured into it.

As a result, they have failed to take each opportunity to escape: the first impeachment, the November 2020 defeat, the January 6 crimes, the second impeachment, the end of the administration, the 2022 wipeout of swing-state election-denying candidates, the first indictment, and now this second indictment.

Along the way, these architects have taught tens of millions of Republican voters and conservative believers to regard the labyrinth of lies as their proper political home. Why escape at all? Escape to where? The ironic outcome of all this is that the deceived followers now block the exits for the deceptive leaders.

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

Trump himself may imagine that the deceived are numerous enough, and militant enough, to topple the American constitutional system for his sake. On that, he’s deceiving himself. One of the important lessons of January 6, 2021, was the marginality of Trump’s hard-core support. Another lesson was the strength and endurance of the American legal system when it’s allowed to function. And with Trump out of the presidency, he’s no longer empowered to sabotage it.

But what he can do—and what his adversaries are perversely helping him do—is alienate his supporters from their own society. What consequences will that alienation inflict? I cannot foresee. Perhaps the mania loosens its grip over time, and some number gradually recover their faith in democracy and the rule of law. Perhaps some number become radically demoralized and quit participating in politics altogether.

Or perhaps American society must contrive to bump along with some important minority of the population passively disloyal to the governing authorities, as happened with the white South in the decades after the Civil War. The rebellion had been subdued, but for the rebels to reconcile themselves to the defeat of their cause would take decades.

One thing that would help: for leading Republicans and conservatives to stop positioning themselves for selfish immediate advantage and end their denigration of the legal process. Thanks to the appointment of hundreds of judges, the Trump presidency bequeathed the country a federal judicial system sharply tilted in a conservative direction. As a result, Trump is often playing in front of his own chosen referees. He’s still mostly losing. And he’s losing because he’s in the wrong.

DeSantis, McCarthy, and the others must be well aware that Trump is in the wrong. They do not insist that Trump is innocent, only that it’s improper to hold him to account. The law is being weaponized, they say, to pursue a party leader (their party leader).

[Read: Trump begins the ‘retribution’ tour]

These Republican leaders expect to extract some short-term advantage from their double game. Maybe that’s a plausible calculation. But it is likely to prove, ultimately, a self-harming one.

The big post-Trump choice for conservatives is whether they rejoin the mainstream of American life or wander ever further away from it, toward outright rejection of law and democracy. Voluntarily breaking with Trump is one way to make that choice. Few conservatives have dared to do so at all, and even fewer have dared to consistently.

Now federal prosecutors have opened an easier way. Republican leaders need not explicitly make that break. They need only repeat the standard formula about any pending criminal investigation: “I have no comment at this time. Every accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The law will take its course.” That’s it. Problem solved.

This is the right thing to do. It’s the prudent thing to do. And any other course of action points to horrible dangers ahead: a future in which the conservative-minded people who should be America’s strongest bulwarks of law and constitutional order mutate into an enduring malcontent faction willing to subvert that order.

If you are a politician, you can respond to public protesters in a variety of ways. You can avoid getting too close to them. You can ignore them. You can use your bully pulpit to address their concerns from a position of strength. What you probably should not do is physically tussle with them or taunt them with childish facial gestures.

But that is precisely what a group of visiting Israeli politicians has been doing in New York City over the past week. Last Friday night, Simcha Rothman, a right-wing Israeli lawmaker, was accosted by a group of Israeli demonstrators on the streets of Manhattan. This was not particularly surprising, given that there are many Israelis in the area, and Rothman is the architect of the government’s proposed overhaul of Israel’s judiciary, which has provoked unprecedented outcry in the country itself. Political protests are common in New York, and this small one would likely have gone unnoticed if not for what happened next: Rothman turned around and wrestled a megaphone away from one of the demonstrators, in an incident that was caught on camera. And he did this on the Sabbath, when religious Jews like himself are forbidden from handling electronic devices. Suddenly, what would have been an unremarkable protest in America became national news in Israel.

Rothman wasn’t alone in inadvertently amplifying his antagonists. Two days later, Amichai Chikli, the government’s minister of diaspora affairs, was photographed at New York’s Celebrate Israel parade giving what appeared to be the finger to nearby protesters. The image of Chikli rocketed around the web, presented by critics as him flipping off the American Jewish community.

[Yair Rosenberg: The Israeli minister who is defending Elon Musk]

This was unfair to Chikli. The middle finger is not a common gesture in Israel, and its meaning was likely unknown to him. As Chikli later explained, he was simply using his middle fingers to lift the edges of his mouth, in order to tell the protesters to “smile” because they were at a parade. In other words, the government minister was not engaged in profane schoolyard taunting of the protesters. He was engaged in non-profane schoolyard taunting of the protesters.

These bizarre altercations might seem like odd one-offs—two men having bad days. But they are not. They are a reflection of the dysfunctional state of the Israeli right and a harbinger of its future. And they are largely the legacy of one man: Benjamin Netanyahu.

Say what you will about Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, but imagining him engaging in any of these antics is impossible. A man of formidable political skill and constant awareness of his position, Netanyahu is famous for managing his image and never allowing his many critics to throw him off his stride. But for decades, he has worked assiduously to ensure that no one with similar talents ever ascends to the summit of right-wing Israeli politics. Rather than groom a successor, he has systematically drummed out every rival competent enough to challenge him, slowly hollowing out his Likud party and reducing it to a cult of personality. The Israeli political landscape is littered with former conservative rising stars dashed upon the rocks of Netanyahu’s ruthless reign. The ones who remain now lead smaller parties, on the outside of Likud looking in.

This successful strategy guaranteed that Netanyahu remained the undisputed king of Israel’s main right-wing party. But it has also ensured that when the 73-year-old premier inevitably departs the scene—whether due to his ongoing corruption trial or his age—there will be no one of his political caliber on the right to replace him. The clownish conduct on display in New York this week was not a coincidence; it was a consequence.

In the past, when pressed about who might succeed him, Netanyahu has offered up his former Mossad head Yossi Cohen and his American-born adviser Ron Dermer—two individuals with no electoral experience or popular following, let alone a path to the premiership. In reality, the future of Netanyahu’s party looks a lot less like him and a lot more like what was on display in New York. When he is gone, this is who will be left.

In 2015, Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s equivalent of Saturday Night Live, ran a sketch that captured the way that many Israeli right-wingers had learned the wrong lessons from Netanyahu’s public persona. In it, the prime minister is being interviewed by CNN, delivering his usual talking points—“and don’t make me say ‘Holocaust’ again, because I will!”—with unctuous precision. But suddenly, he is interrupted by the appearance on-screen of another conservative Israeli politician. A perturbed Netanyahu asks, “What are you doing here? Lecturing the world in English is my thing.” The man replies, “You call that English? Get this: subsequently.” The interview then devolves into the two men competing over who can say the most complicated English words.

[David Grossman: Israeli democracy faces a mortal threat]

Today, this comedy has become reality. Right-wing Israeli politics is full of Netanyahu wannabes without Netanyahu’s talent—people who confuse language skills for political skills. Last month, I experienced this firsthand. I interviewed Chikli, the diaspora-affairs minister, after he publicly intervened on Twitter to defend Elon Musk, who had tweeted that the Jewish financier George Soros “hates humanity” and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization.” Many considered these remarks to be anti-Semitic, and I expected to have a robust debate over whether these people were misreading or overreacting to Musk’s words. But though Chikli enthusiastically agreed to the interview, he did not come prepared to answer the question it was premised upon, refusing five times to discuss the actual content of Musk’s tweets.

The ability to speak English does not imply the capability to persuade; it can just as easily provide opportunities to be embarrassed. Today’s Israeli right is full of politicians who know enough English to speak it but not enough to know how they sound—people who mistake performative trolling for effective politicking. This is Netanyahu’s legacy: an Israeli right that has the ability to talk to the world but diminishing capacity to navigate it.

Real-life Ron DeSantis was here, finally. In the fidgety flesh; in Iowa, South Carolina, and, in this case, New Hampshire. Not some distant Sunshine State of potential or idealized Donald Trump alternative or voice in the far-off static of Twitter Spaces. But an actual human being interacting with other human beings, some 200 of them, packed into an American Legion hall in the town of Rochester.

“Okay, smile, close-up,” an older woman told the Florida governor, trying to pull him in for another photo. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, had just finished a midday campaign event, and the governor was now working a quick rope line—emphasis on quick and double emphasis on working. The fast-talking first lady is much better suited to this than her halting husband. He smiled for the camera like the dentist had just asked him to bite down on a blob of putty; like he was trying to make a mold, or to fit one. It was more of a cringe than a grin.

“Governor, I have a lot of relatives in Florida,” the next selfie guy told him. Everybody who meets DeSantis has relatives in Florida or a time-share on Clearwater Beach or a bunch of golf buddies who retired to the Villages. “Wow, really?” DeSantis said.

He was trying. But this did not look fun for him.

Retail politicking was never DeSantis’s gift. Not that it mattered much before, in the media-dominated expanse of Florida politics, where DeSantis has proved himself an elite culture warrior and troller of libs. DeSantis was reelected by 19 points last November. He calls himself the governor of the state “where woke goes to die,” which he believes will be a model for his presidency of the whole country, a red utopia in his own image.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

What does the on-paper promise of DeSantis look like in practice? DeSantis has performed a number of these in-person chores in recent days, after announcing his presidential campaign on May 24 in a glitchy Twitter Spaces appearance with Elon Musk.

As I watched him complete his rounds in New Hampshire on Thursday—visits to a VFW hall, an Elks Club, and a community college, in addition to the American Legion post—the essential duality of his campaign was laid bare: DeSantis is the ultimate performative politician when it comes to demonstrating outrage and “kneecapping” various woke abuses—but not so much when it comes to the actual in-person performance of politics.

The campaign billed his appearance in Rochester as a “fireside chat.” (The outside temperature was 90 degrees, and there was no actual fire.) The governor and first lady also held fireside chats this week at a welding shop in Salix, Iowa, and at an event space in Lexington, South Carolina. The term conjures the great American tradition started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Those were scary times—grim visages of malnourished kids and food riots and businessmen selling pencils on the street. FDR’s cozy evenings around the radio hearth were meant to project comfort and avuncular authority.

Sitting on gray armchairs onstage in Rochester—Casey cross-legged and Ron man-spread—the DeSanti reassured their audience that the Florida governor was the candidate best equipped to protect Americans from contemporary threats no less serious than stock-market crashes and bank closures. He was focused on a distinct set of modern menaces: “woke indoctrination” and “woke militaries” and “woke mind viruses” and “woke mobs” that endanger every institution of American life. He used woke more than a dozen times at each event (I counted).

Also, DeSantis said he’s a big supporter of “the death penalty for pedophiles” (applause); reminded every audience that he’d sent dozens of migrants to “beautiful Martha’s Vineyard” (bigger applause); and promised to end “this Faucian dystopia” around COVID once and for all (biggest applause).

Also, George Soros (boo).

[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]

Casey talked at each New Hampshire stop about the couple’s three young children, often in the vein of how adorably naughty they are—how they write on the walls of the governor’s mansion with permanent markers and leave crayon stains on the carpets. Ron spoke in personal terms less often, but when he did, it was usually to prove that he understands the need to protect kids from being preyed upon by the various and ruthless forces of wokeness. One recurring example on Thursday involved how outrageous it is that in certain swim competitions, a girl might wind up being defeated by a transgender opponent. “I’m particularly worried about this as the father of two daughters,” DeSantis told the Rochester crowd.

This played well in the room full of committed Republicans and likely primary voters, as it does on Fox. Clearly, this is a fraught and divisive issue, but one that’s been given outsized attention in recent years, especially in relation to the portion of the population it directly affects. By comparison, DeSantis never mentioned gun violence, the leading cause of death for children in this country, including many in his state (the site of the horrific Parkland massacre of 2018, the year before he became governor). DeSantis readily opts for the culture-war terrain, ignoring the rest, pretty much everywhere he goes.

His whole act can feel like a clunky contrivance—a forced persona railing against phony or hyped-up outrages. He can be irascible. Steve Peoples, a reporter for the Associated Press, approached DeSantis after a speech at a VFW hall in Laconia and asked the governor why he hadn’t taken any questions from the audience. “Are you blind?” DeSantis snapped at Peoples. “Are you blind? Okay, so, people are coming up to me, talking to me [about] whatever they want to talk to me about.”

No one in the room cared about this little outburst besides the reporters (who sent a clip of it bouncing across social media within minutes). And if the voters did care, it would probably reflect well on DeSantis in their eyes, demonstrating his willingness to get in the media’s face.

[Yair Rosenberg: DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020]

Journalists who managed to get near DeSantis this week unfailingly asked him about Donald Trump, the leading GOP candidate. In Rochester, NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez wondered about the former president’s claim that he would eliminate the federal government’s “administrative state” within six months of a second term. “Why didn’t you do it when you had four years?” DeSantis shot back.

In general, though, DeSantis didn’t mention Trump without being prompted—at least not explicitly. He drew clear, if barely veiled, contrasts. “I will end the culture of losing in the Republican Party,” he vowed Thursday night in Manchester. Unsaid, obviously, is that the GOP has underperformed in the past three national elections—and no one is more to blame than Trump and the various MAGA disciples he dragged into those campaigns.

“Politics is not about building a brand,” DeSantis went on to say. What matters is competence and conviction, not charisma. “My husband will never back down!” Casey added in support. In other words: He is effective and he will follow through and actually do real things, unlike you-know-who.

“Politics is not about entertainment,” DeSantis said in all of his New Hampshire speeches, usually at the end. He might be trying to prove as much.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

If there were a Hall of Fame for song lyrics and you got to make one nomination, what would it be and why? (The linguist John McWhorter might pick something from Steely Dan.)

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

Here at The Atlantic I made the case this week that most of the money that companies are spending on DEI consultants ought to be redirected to the poor. For the main argument, I hope you’ll check out the article. I’ll whet your appetite with my gloss on how the DEI industry exploded so rapidly:

On rare occasions, a depraved act captures the attention of a nation so completely that there is a widespread impulse to vow “never again” and to act in the hope of making good on that promise. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination prompted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered a global war against al-Qaeda, among many other things, including the tenuously connected invasion and occupation of Iraq.

[George] Floyd’s murder was similarly galvanizing. Arresting, trying, and convicting the police officers involved, and implementing new police training, was the most immediate response. But Floyd’s story suggested some additional possibilities. With several criminal convictions in his past, Floyd tried to turn his life around, preaching nonviolence in a neighborhood plagued by gun crime, serving as a mentor to young people, and trying to stay employed. He also struggled with drug addiction, layoffs due to circumstances beyond his control, and money problems that presumably played a role in the counterfeit bill he was trying to pass on the day that he was killed. If a callous police officer was the primary cause of his death, secondary causes were as complex and varied as poverty in America.

So how strange––how obscene, in fact––that America’s professional class largely reacted to Floyd’s murder not by lavishing so much of the resources spent in his name on helping poor people, or the formerly (or currently) incarcerated, or people with addictions, or the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, or children of single mothers, or graduates of underfunded high schools, but rather by hiring DEI consultants to gather employees together for trainings.

At best, these outlays symbolize something like, We care about DEI and we’re willing to spend money to prove it. A more jaded appraisal is that they symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather “the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good.”

Won’t Anyone Think of the Children?

In Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown argues that in the name of child protection, Congress and many states are considering legislation that would fundamentally alter the internet as we know it. She cites age verification as an example, writing:

Proposals at both the state and federal level would require age verification on social media. Age verification schemes create massive privacy and security concerns, effectively outlawing anonymity online and leaving all users vulnerable to data leaks, corporate snoops, malicious foreign actors, and domestic spying. To verify user ages, social media companies would have to collect driver's licenses or other state-issued ID from all users in some capacity—by having users directly submit their documentation to the platform or by relying on third-party ID services, potentially run by the government.

Alternatively they may rely on biometric data, such as facial scans. Several such proposals are currently before Congress. For instance, the Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective (MATURE) Act (S. 419), from Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), would ban people under age 16 from social media platforms. To verify users are above age 16, platforms would have to collect full names, dates of birth, and "a scan, image, or upload of government-issued identification." The requirement would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and a private right of action. (In the House, the Social Media Child Protection Act, from Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stuart, would do the same thing.) The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act (S. 1291), from Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii), is another bill that would explicitly require social media platforms to "verify the age of their users." This one would ban children under 13 entirely and allow 13- to 17-year-olds to join only with parental consent, in addition to prohibiting the use of "algorithmic recommendation systems" for folks under age 18 …

Commerce would allegedly keep no records where people used their digital identification—though considering what we know about domestic data collection, it's hard to trust this pledge. In any event, administering the program would necessarily require obtaining and storing personal data. If widely adopted, it would essentially require people to register with the government in order to speak online.

The Rolling Stones Revisited

With this week’s question about music, I was reminded of a great 2010 article that the journalist Bill Wyman published in Slate, creatively written as Mick Jagger’s thoughts on Keith Richards.

Here he is making the case for Richards’s talent:

As a pure rock (not folk or pop) songwriter, I think he is not just without peer. I think he is unrivaled in depth and growth, from “As Tears Go By” to “Satisfaction” to “Jumping Jack Flash” to, I don’t know, “Gimme Shelter. ” “Monkey Man.” “Street Fighting Man.” The primal feel of the chording. The musicality of the intros and breaks. The innovation of the recording—cruder, no doubt, but I will argue far more emotionally powerful than the Beatles’. The winding, intermixed guitars he almost desperately loved. Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone? It is hard to use a word like integrity about a band as compromised, as self-bloodied, as we were. But for some years, unlike any other group, the Beatles included, we declared war on that silly, hypocritical, repressive, and arbitrary society in which we lived. The only ammunition we had were Keith’s songs. The lyrics, I confess now, may have been in their defiance just épater la bourgeoisie and in their poesy derivatively Zimmerman-esque. Even when they weren’t, no one would have paid attention if the chords weren’t arresting, irrefutable. The songs spoke primarily through their music, not their words. Keith’s doting fans nattering on about the ultimate avatar of rock ’n’ roll authenticity irritate me, it’s true; but he may to this day be underappreciated.

Casey DeSantis Makes Her Pitch

In National Review, Michael Brendan Doughtery flags some oratory from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s wife, who said in a recent appearance:

When you look at Covid, the world descended on Florida. You had the corporate media, the Left, the White House, Fauci, Birx, all prognosticating that every bad thing would happen unless the governor followed their dictates, and their politicized, unscientific orthodoxy. But he held the line in defense of the liberties of the people he represented. He never backed down. He took their livelihoods and their happiness above his own. You can take the path of least resistance. You subcontract your leadership to the medical bureaucracy. You can aim for self-preservation. You can be more interested in your political career. Or you can hold the line. Do you defend the rights of the people? Their ability to earn a living, to be with their loved ones, especially in their final moments. Do you fight for our children to be in school, to breathe without a mask being forced on their face? Do you ensure that people have the choice as to whether or not they want to take an mRNA vaccine and certainly not make it contingent upon their job? At the end of the day, it’s what you do in the moment that matters.

Dougherty goes on to argue that the COVID pitch is perhaps DeSantis’s biggest strength:

Now, many liberals and some conservatives reading this list will shrug. They were happy to mask their kids for two years. They credit the vaccines with ending the public-health emergency.

But for a huge swath of voters, this issue really did bond them to Governor DeSantis. At the moment that Casey DeSantis mentioned masks on children, the crowd spontaneously started roiling with noises of anger at the pro-mask policies—and approval of the governor, for rolling them back.

Those days three years ago really were the moment that many families started wondering whether they too should join the scores of thousands of other Americans who were moving to Florida during the pandemic. This was the moment that made Ron DeSantis a national figure. These voters credit Florida—and to a lesser degree Georgia and Texas—with normalizing the country after the pandemic. These voters knew what the experts also knew but refused to admit publicly: that they didn’t need the vaccine because they had already contracted Covid and had natural immunity; or that they were young and not vulnerable to severe Covid. They knew, long before the experts admitted, that the Covid vaccine did not stop transmission, and that the logic of mandates was therefore mooted. In their hearts, these voters knew that expert opinion was a kind of guild conspiracy that—when joined with the force of government—directly threatened their livelihood, their family, and the well-being of their children.

And DeSantis took unorthodox steps to protect the social fabric of Florida. He used the emergency powers the public-health crisis granted to him to mandate that schools remain open, and to mandate that schools not impose their own mask mandates on children. Any fool—even Dr. Fauci himself at the start of the pandemic—could figure out that child-sized cloth masks bought at a sunglasses stand were not an effective public-health measure against an airborne virus. But only DeSantis and a handful of other governors ever acted, and acted vigorously, on this obvious truth. By using his powers in this way, he pioneered a model for how he would begin using constitutional executive power to prevent the ideological contagions of the left from seizing all the institutions of public life.

It will be interesting to see the DeSantis campaign attack Donald Trump not as irresponsibly lax on COVID-19, but rather as the president who ostensibly presided over needlessly draconian COVID shutdowns and kept the distrusted-by-right-populists Anthony Fauci in his job.

Provocation of the Week

In From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, the late historian Jacques Barzun wrote the following:

With so much knowledge written down and disseminated and so many ardent workers and eager patrons conspiring to produce the new, it was inevitable that technique and style should gradually turn from successful trial and error to foolproof recipe. The close study of antique remains, especially in architecture, turned these sources of inspiration into models to copy.

The result was frigidity—or at best cool elegance. It is a cultural generality that going back to the past is most fruitful at the beginning, when the Idea and not the technique is the point of interest. As knowledge grows more exact, originality grows less; perfection increases as inspiration decreases. In painting, this downward curve of artistic intensity is called by the suggestive name of Mannerism. It is applicable at more than one moment in the history of the arts. The Mannerist is not to be despised, even though his high competence is secondhand, learned from others instead of worked out for himself. His art need not lack individual character, and to some connoisseurs it gives the pleasure of virtuosity, the exercise of power on demand, but for the critic it poses an enigma: why should the pleasure be greater when the power is in the making rather than on tap? There may be no answer, but a useful corollary is that perfection is not a necessary characteristic of the greatest art.

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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.

Florida's governor has embraced rhetoric against US internationalism. But unlike Trump, he needs the GOP mainstream.