As evidence of that last point, Gillespie points to some boos Trump recently received from a staunchly anti-vax crowd when he announced he’d received his booster shot and bragged about his administration’s role in bringing the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines swiftly and safely to market. Add in “rising stars in the GOP,” like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who will give Trump voters “95 percent of what they want,” and it makes sense to conclude “Trump is as overcooked as one of his steaks.”

The only problem with this analysis is … there’s no data to support it. An aggregation of early GOP primary polls has Trump pulling 52.4 percent of the vote, with the second-place DeSantis coming in with less than a third of that (16.4 percent) and everyone else deep into single digits. That’s not a close race, and much stronger than Trump’s polling through the entirety of the GOP primaries in 2016.

Moreover, when the polls are re-run without Trump included, the results show no similar consolidation around any alternative to Trump. DeSantis pulls in around 28 percent, followed by former Vice President Mike Pence at 16 percent, Donald Trump Jr. at 12 percent, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at 9.5 percent, and everyone else at 5 percent or lower.