If some high-level Democrat Party operator was to find a magic lamp, he could do far worse than to spend his three wishes as follows:

1) “Give us an election opponent our unimpressive candidate has beaten before and we know he can beat again.”

2) “For added insurance, give us a way to make him completely toxic to anyone who might be on the fence about tossing us out of office.”

3) “Make the opposing party complete oblivious to what we’re doing until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

This is exactly what’s happening right now with the 2024 Republican presidential primary, with one crucial difference—there’s no magic involved, and Democrats’ opponents are ultimately doing it to themselves.

The first wish is granted with Donald Trump, who for the reasons explained Friday is uniquely situated to lose to Joe Biden, a corrupt, senile extremist with an abysmal job performance that any normal Republican should be able to put away without breaking a sweat. Indeed, in any other scenario Biden would be exactly the sort of foe that Republicans would ask the genie for. Yet against Trump, he was able to win once despite barely campaigning. And all signs point to a repeat matchup ending the same way.

The second wish takes the form of a slate of wide-ranging and transparently political criminal charges across multiple jurisdictions that trigger Republican primary voters’ senses of sympathy and unfair play to make them rally around Trump—and do the opposite in the eyes of everyone else. As also explained Friday, these cases have drained and will continue to drain millions of dollars from the Trump campaign’s war chest, severely depleting the amount it will be able to spend on advertising, get-out-the-vote operations, and ballot harvesting, not to mention the courtroom schedule keeping him from a lot of campaign stops. And the voters he’s not reaching out to won’t flock to Truth Social to seek out his campaign pitch, let alone his side of the legal story.

In April, a CNN/SSRS poll found that 76% of respondents recognized that the weakest and pettiest indictment against Trump, concerning the payment to pornstar Stormy Daniels, was politically motivated to one degree or another…but 60% supported it anyway, including 62% of independents. Now that Trump is formally accused of much, much graver things, a Navigator Research poll released Friday finds that 62% of registered voters think he committed a crime, including 67% of independents. Strong majorities of overall and independent voters see all four indictments as serious.

Show of hands: who thinks numbers like these are going to get better once actual trials begin, and the media bombards every screen in every American home with a constant stream of the most dramatic, salacious, and one-sided details of every government claim and every piece of witness testimony. If you think Trump’s standing with the general public is bad now (and yes, folks at The Federalist, “only slightly less disliked than Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi” is bad by any sane measure), just wait. Trump could easily go down in history as the new Walter Mondale.

But here’s the kicker: Trump isn’t the Republican nominee yet. He doesn’t have to be. None of this works unless we make him the nominee. We, conservative and Republican voters, right now have it completely within our power to utterly gut the Democrats’ scheme.

Unfortunately, that’s where the third wish comes in: a perfect storm of influences giving Trump a ridiculously durable lead in the GOP primary field. As a Ron DeSantis supporter, I know all the counters by heart: no votes have been cast yet, Ron’s got a great ground game in the early states, an early win in Iowa will start a chain reaction, etc. I hope they’re all true. But we can’t just ignore that the overall situation. DeSantis’s debate performance did help a little, but not nearly enough. Part of that is due to mistakes the DeSantis campaign has made and keeps making, which I’ve talked about before and will continue to hammer in the future.

But it’s also due to the fundamental corruption of the conservative infotainment landscape—talk radio, the Fox primetime lineup, the big-name conservative websites and online personalities. With a handful of exceptions, the biggest and most influential names in right-wing media are content to feed their audiences a steady diet of Trump positivity and victimhood accompanied by generic choir-preaching about the Left’s every outrage, idiocy, or hypocrisy—with adult conversation about how we really got here or what to do about any of it nowhere in sight.

One of the most surreal displays of all this came from Glenn Beck reacting Monday to news that one of Trump’s cases is slated to begin just before Super Tuesday. He recognizes the timing as “election interference,” and even that he thinks Democrats “want him to be the candidate, and then put him in jail”…but treats that bombshell as some kind of footnote observation rather than the key to the whole mess with obvious implications for listeners’ choices (it certainly didn’t inform Beck’s slobbering interview with The Failure the next day).

Polls have shown throughout the primary that most of Trump’s current support is not comprised of creepy cultist types who would sooner sell their kids than vote for any Republican but Trump. They are defaulting to Trump when asked to pick, but almost half also say they’re not exclusive; they’re still open to other candidates. So why are they defaulting to Trump? One big factor is because the primary media they consume gives them no reason not to (fun fact: to date, The Federalist still has not informed its readers that the Trump campaign raised $250 million in 2020 by telling people their donations were going to an “election defense fund” that didn’t exist).

This is no magic spell, but for the way it’s got Republican primary voters happily walking straight toward a cliff, it might as well be. Unless Republican voters snap out of it, it won’t be long before Democrats don’t need a genie to make all the rest of their nightmarish wishes come true.