Donald Trump did not deliberately incite a violent insurrection, try to get his own vice president killed, or attempt to subvert American democracy following his 2020 defeat. Such hysterics distract us from the 45th president’s actual offenses: reducing public perception of the election integrity cause to a conspiratorial clown show, and warping Republican voters’ understanding of electoral politics into a suicide pact.

First, to set the record straight about 2020: It is the prerogative of any losing candidate to lawfully dispute an election’s results, however implausibly or futilely; if it wasn’t, the press would have to speak very differently about Al Gore and Stacey Abrams (with an honorable mention to Hillary Clinton, who did not legally challenge her 2016 loss but has spent the years since insisting she was robbed, which didn’t garner a fraction of the “sore loser” branding from the press that Trump received). And contrary to the prevailing narrative, there remains ample reason to wonder about Joe Biden’s margin of victory.

A staggering 28 states relaxed their vote-by-mail rules in 2020, contributing to a 17-million increase in voter participation from 2016. On top of the myriad ways mail ballots are known to be less secure than in-person votes, four of the states to change their rules—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—did so without legislative consent. Those four alone comprised 56 of Biden’s 306 electoral votes—more than enough to put Trump’s 232 EVs over the 270 threshold. Not to mention the so-called “Zuckerbucks,” millions in grants to 2,500 election offices nationwide, through which left-wing activists bankrolled in part by Facebook and Google exerted influence over election administration, including hiring ballot counters and collectors, kicking out GOP poll watchers in Philadelphia, and even, in at least one case that we know of in Wisconsin, gaining access to absentee ballot storage before the election.

It shouldn’t take susceptibility to misinformation and conspiracy theories, or even any particular sympathy for Trump, to see a problem with this, or to recognize how dangerously un-American it is to attempt to criminalize even the most slapdash and insincere objections to it. It merely requires recognizing that a process overwhelmed by the massive, and in some states illegal, expansion of a practice in which poll workers never actually see who casts a ballot compromised the election enough that it’s impossible to be sure the outcome was on the level.

Credibly challenging the election should have been a straightforward matter of laying out the above points, then arguing that they necessitated new elections in tainted jurisdictions. Granted, the odds would have still been against such a challenge, given intense political and media pressure to let Biden’s victory stand and the explosive nature of redoing elections, but at least it would have been about real issues, after which the challengers could walk away without lasting damage to their credibility or to those counting on them.

Instead, Team Trump made the worst possible decision at every turn, with disastrous results.

Yes, they were wronged by several judges who dismissed suits on technicalities without reviewing their fact claims. But the astounding incompetence of both Trump’s campaign counsel and lawyers acting independently on his behalf—like, say, mistaking Minnesota counties for Michigan ones in affidavits—strongly suggests that at least some of the dismissals were warranted. Meanwhile, prominent (and unscrupulous) “Stop the Steal” figures peddling nonsense about Venezuelan voting machines and German data servers made well-meaning election doubters seem like crackpots by association.

More fundamentally, the campaign’s proposed remedies—asking judges to just cancel entire batches of votes and award electors to Trump—would have disenfranchised an unknowable number of people who voted in good faith, something any attorney smarter than a toaster ought to have instantly recognized that no sane judge would condone.

When all that inevitably failed, and his last hopes coalesced into a hare-brained scheme to contest Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results, Trump did what he does best: hold a rally. It was never going to accomplish anything, of course, but it let him indulge in his favorite part of being president: playacting as the mighty leader marshaling the will of an adoring public. What’s more, we now know from Trump campaign officials’ own testimony that they didn’t actually expect to overturn the election, but pretended otherwise because it raised $250 million for an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist.

Even without Trump intending or being culpable for the riot that followed this pointless, duplicitous event, the fact remains that it gave a massive black eye to election integrity activists. Questions about the legitimacy of the election can be brushed off by invoking his 0-64 courtroom record, and the optics of January 6 give politicians an excuse to steer clear of the subject—which is now associated, however unfairly, with conspiratorial tendencies and/or cultish devotion to Trump’s self-image as the man who never loses.

That’s not to say the cause is lost; fourteen states have tightened their election laws since 2020, though more work remains—work that now has to contend with needless perception hurdles thanks to Trump’s recklessness.

Speaking of which, Trump only had to worry about vote fraud in the first place because he spent four years doing nothing about it when he had the chance. Nothing, that is, except convene a blue-ribbon panel that, according to the great election integrity watchdog J. Christian Adams, was sabotaged from within by Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a Democrat Trump stupidly put on the panel for no better reason than to make it “non-partisan.” Oh, Trump’s Justice Department did send observers to polling places on Election Day…to monitor for identity-based “voter intimidation and suppression” the same way Barack Obama’s DOJ did, not to watch out for fraud.

Add to that Trump’s embrace of Covid-19 lockdowns in his fourth year, which destroyed his own economy and unleashed unprecedented assaults on personal freedom, and his signing of the CARES Act, which gave states $400 million to adopt and expand pandemic election measures such as vote-by-mail, and he had a perfect recipe for either losing outright or narrowing the gap between himself and a corrupt, mentally-infirm, left-wing extremist enough for dubious ballots to conceivably close it.

But the worst part? Trump and the cottage industry surrounding him have spent every day since January 20, 2021 conditioning his voters to ensure it all happens again.

Since the election, sincere fraud concerns have been conflated with Trump’s narcissistic insistence that he didn’t just win 2020; he won it “by a lot” because he’s so widely beloved. It couldn’t possibly have been a close election, and stuffing drop boxes in Democrat strongholds couldn’t be enough to overcome The Donald’s Beatlemania-like popularity. Nothing less than voting machines rigged so thoroughly that Democrats can just make up whatever numbers they want sufficed to explain “THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY.”

As a result, a vocal portion of Republican voters are convinced that all the conventional (plus a few not-so-conventional) electability factors—overall likeability, age and energy, appeal to independents and swing voters, stigma of being a criminal defendant in multiple active cases (regardless of the cases’ merits or lack thereof), diminished ability to spend campaign funds on campaigning instead of legal bills (which Trump admits) or time on the campaign trail instead of in courtrooms (which Trump also admits)—can be safely ignored because most of the country secretly loves Trump. He doesn’t have any real weaknesses to worry about; vote fraud is the only thing standing between him and a landslide! (Never mind that he offers no reason to be confident he’s preparing to more effectively contest future fraud or outperform Democrats in ballot harvesting—things that also take a lot of money which, as just mentioned, is currently being eaten up by lawyers and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.)

And while the conservative infotainment complex may be happy to feed such delusions (or at least let them go unchallenged), the truth is that every available metric tells us most of the country does not, in fact, secretly love Trump. His weaknesses are real, and they’re fatal to his candidacy—and, by extension, to the country if we make control of the federal executive branch dependent on him again.

In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—four of the states Trump won in 2016 then lost in 2020—most polls tracked by FiveThirtyEight have Biden beating Trump but losing to Ron DeSantis. The fifth, Wisconsin, is tougher for both Republicans, but DeSantis still gets closer. DeSantis also does better in Virginia, where Trump never won but a GOP pickup is conceivable with DeSantis, given his stances for parental rights and educational sanity were the same issues fueling Glenn Youngkin’s subsequent gubernatorial upset. (Yes, some national head-to-head polls look feasible for Trump…for now. But as anyone with basic civic literacy should know, we elect presidents in America state-to-state, not by national popular votes.)

Yes, Biden’s job approval is abysmal. But as much as Americans dislike Biden, they dislike Trump more. As of August 25, Biden’s favorability average compiled by RealClearPolitics is underwater by an embarrassing 14.9 points, but Trump’s is even worse at 18.6 points—while DeSantis tops both of them with a net negative of 11.3. What’s more, neither Biden’s undecided remainder (5.3%) nor Trump’s (4.6%) comes close to getting them above water, but DeSantis’s 15.9% can. Biden and Trump are both extremely well known with litanies of obvious negatives; there just aren’t that many voters who haven’t solidified their opinions about them yet. DeSantis, whose 20-point reelection last year demonstrated an unmatched ability to make inroads across the board, is the only one with meaningful room to both impress the unfamiliar and win over people who know him only from national media lies (lies which, by the way, Team Trump is happy to promote).

But what about the people who actually decide elections? Since June 2022, data analysis company Impact Social has conducted in-depth tracking of the social media activity of a whopping 40,000 swing voters to gauge their sentiments about both candidates. In all that time, in their eyes, Trump has been underwater by more than 20 points, usually skimming or dipping below negative-30. The best Trump has ever done against DeSantis is trail him by 13 points, though he more often trails by over 20 (a few times trailing by 35 and at one point even dropping to a 43-point gap).

Recent polls have found that Americans aren’t exactly enamored with the prospect of choosing between the same two options they were stuck with in 2020, but every piece of information we have—polling data, social media trends, previous election outcomes (including the 2022 midterms where Trump’s preferred Senate candidates cost Republicans the majority), capacity to mount an effective campaign, likelihood of learning from mistakes, prospects for current image getting better or worse, revulsion from members of his own party—forecasts the same choice ending the same way. America simply can’t stand Trump.

Biden being a terrible president with a bad economy won’t be enough to save us any more than it did in the midterms. For Trump to eke out a win despite all the above, some future event would have to make Democrats look so vastly worse than they currently do that even someone voters consider an insufferable clown and possible felon would look preferable—for instance, Biden’s cognitive decline manifesting in a catastrophic public breakdown (which Trump’s refusal to debate helps Democrats reduce the odds of by giving Biden an excuse to not debate either, though we should still brace for the possibility of Democrats replacing him with a younger model just in case), or a new crisis on par with Covid 2020 (perhaps courtesy of Russia or China).

Not totally inconceivable, but nowhere near likely enough to gamble the country’s fate on—not with Democrats seeking another chance to ram through a legislative agenda that wouldn’t just advance their ideology, but make that advance irreversible by amnestying millions of new Democrat voters, gutting election integrity nationwide, and packing the Supreme Court with enough brand-new leftist judges to rubber-stamp it all.

That’s the biggest irony here—if those railing the loudest against “rigged elections” get their way and renominate Trump, his near-certain defeat would most likely usher in the very thing Trump’s biggest fans insist we’ve already got: a new normal in which national elections really are rigged beyond repair and Republicans can never win nationally again.

This is not a game. Everything conservatives believe in is on the line, up to and including our ability to do anything about it in future elections. That’s why we don’t have the luxury of refusing to support whoever the Republican nominee ultimately is (yes, even one as weak and ineffectual as Trump, if it comes to that), but more immediately why every conservative professional of every kind has a clear moral responsibility to stop pandering to MAGA groupies for easy clicks and help nominate the candidate who’s actually electable (and who happens to be the most effective warrior in a generation for everything the Right’s top personalities built their careers on claiming to care about anyway). [UPDATE, Jan. 26, 2024: I no longer stand by the crossed-out statement. Here’s why.]

With the possible exception of fleecing gullible Americans out of their money under false pretenses, Team Trump’s antics between November 3, 2020 and January 20, 2021 were not criminal, and treating them as such must be punished. But what they did to the Right’s survival instincts is worse than criminal. It’s poison. We had ample time over the past two years to treat it; instead our leaders chose to let it spread. Now we have less than a year to convince a majority of primary voter to take the cure before it very likely kills us.