At the end of the summer of 2022, I made a bold prediction. I proclaimed that former President Donald Trump would not win the Republican nomination—that he would not even run a real campaign for president. I based my theory, somewhat hubristically, on the idea that he would not run because he would not win. To wit:

[Trump] may say out loud, “I am a candidate for president,” at some point, but if he does I bet he will find an excuse to pull the plug on such a “candidacy” before the start of the primaries in early 2024 because of his fear of being branded a loser.

Welp, the first primary came and went last week, and Trump beat his final remaining GOP opponent, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, by 11 points in the state deemed her best chance at pulling off an upset of her former boss.

Ah! Well. Nevertheless, as they say.

How did I get this so horribly wrong, aside from an apparently mediocre-at-best acumen for political analysis and total lack of insight into the Republican primary electorate?

As a coastal-based journalist (I live in L.A.), it’s worth considering if I deceived myself about Trump’s power—and in particular his continued hold on power—because of a liberal cocoon I’ve built around myself. But I don’t think that’s the issue: I have attended Trump events and been diagnosing the Republican cult of personality around Trump for nearly a decade. (I have friends and extended family members who vote for Trump—some of whom are deeply in that cult—and so I don’t dismiss its ability to persuade even intelligent and decent people to ride or die for its wannabe dictator.)

Anyway, it’s not really that I thought the most devoted Trump supporters would turn—I just figured the rest of the GOP electorate would be strategic enough to seize an opportunity to be rid of a figure that has wreaked so much damage on the party. Despite this not happening, I still think that several parts of my theory have been mostly borne out by the past year and a half. I figured that members of the political press were overestimating Trump’s political strength for fear of being shown to be wrong about a former president who seemed to have the ability to wriggle out of any and every jam. In doing that, they failed to take into account the several data points showing that things had, in fact, changed.

Trump’s political strength was being vastly exaggerated, I reasoned. Considered in the cold, harsh light of reality, he was one of only a handful of defeated incumbents in the modern history of the presidency—and he lost in 2020 by a historically significant margin in the popular vote. “Trump will be a politically crippled figure heading into the 2024 primary,” I argued back in August 2022. “At his most dangerous, he will be a political albatross hanging around the neck of the Republican Party, tearing it apart.” Three months after I wrote this, the Trump-led GOP crashed and burned in its bid to retake the Senate and barely retook the House of Representatives against an unpopular Democratic president, with the most vocally Trump-backed candidates experiencing the most spectacular failures. Sure, one short week after that election, Trump declared his run for the........

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