That last question should remind Republican politicians of 2016, and of Trump’s own rise. Throughout the Obama era, a lot of Republican politicians acted like mimes trapped within invisible walls: They behaved as though there were strict ideological rules about what could be said to Republican voters about spending, taxes, entitlements, foreign policy, the role of government, and many other issues — as if the party’s base demanded strict orthodoxy to a kind of libertarian-infused caricature of Reaganism. Trump wasn’t even aware of these taboos, and so blasted right through them in 2016, and it turned out the party’s voters didn’t really care about them after all. Republican politicians were liberated from those constraints (though a fair number still don’t realize that), but they were so confused by it all that they just adopted a new set of constraints involving Trump himself. Now there were things you could never say to Republican voters about Donald Trump. Even the 2020 election didn’t really change that, so the working assumption in Republican politics is that the GOP primary electorate demands absolute, groveling fidelity to the guy who lost the party the last election. But what if it turns out that this is no more true than the last supposedly binding orthodoxy?

You would think that Donald Trump would want to avoid asking that question, and testing the strength of his hold on the party. Yet it is Trump who has launched this test, pursuing a strategy likely to weaken his position and standing in the GOP, almost regardless of how the primaries turn out.