And please don’t tell me that the GOP should choose Trump again because “he fights.” The Republican Party now has a whole host of other candidates who “fight,” and none of them come with Trump’s baggage, his torpidness, his ill-discipline, his self-indulgence, his abject disregard for our constitutional order, or his pathological, unyielding, surrealistic dishonesty. What, pray tell, did Donald Trump say as president that Ron DeSantis wouldn’t have? What law did he sign that Greg Abbott would have vetoed? Which of the judicial picks that the Federalist Society prepared for him would have been rejected by Tim Scott or Marco Rubio or Kim Reynolds? Trump’s apologists tend to cast him as an unfortunate package deal: You want the policy, you get the lunacy, too. But that isn’t true anymore — if it ever was. Embrace the glorious future, in which you are no longer obliged to tie the agenda you favor to a hand grenade.

Also important: That none of the other candidates have lost an election to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and then disgracefully lied about it for a year; that none of the other candidates have inspired a riot in the service of that lie; that none of the other candidates have sat in their country club for the last two years issuing unhinged press releases, delivering impotent endorsements, and attempting to undermine Mitch McConnell, the most effective Republican senator of the last 50 years. Yes, some of the criticisms of Donald Trump were unjust — as have been some of the open-ended investigations into his conduct — but Trump is hated by an awful lot of Americans for good cause, and there is absolutely no reason for those Americans to be asked to sweat their vote again next time around. The GOP does not lack options. It does not need to return to this well.