The more conscientious of the Trump-haters are taking to their fox-holes and emitting peculiar noises that could easily be mistaken for expressions of panic. Peggy Noonan, who infamously described President Trump as “a tumor metastasizing in the Oval Office,” and went as far as any sane person could with President Biden, is now giving pep talks in the Wall Street Journal to inspirit Governor DeSantis, and to anyone minded to join the race for the presidential nomination in either party. 

Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review, purports to believe that Mr. Trump can’t win. He is an outstanding lawyer but with no particular credentials as an election analyst, and he now claims to have been a Trump loyalist during the Russia-collusion nonsense, which in fact he took seriously right up to the publication of the Mueller Report. He denies that he is a Trump-hater though he admits to being a Trump opponent and approved his impeachment and conviction for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The truism shared by the Democrats almost literally whistling past the graveyard, and by the imperishable Never Trump Republicans, is that Mr. Trump cannot defeat Mr. Biden: “Biden beat Trump in 2020; there’s no reason why he won’t win again in 2024.” Yes, there are a number of reasons. In 2020 Mr. Trump was the perfect target for a wall-to-wall political press and 100 percent social media pillory. 

Hardly six hours went by for months on end when Mr. Trump did not give his enemies a tweet or other public comment that they could ridicule or mangle into at the least, an “unpresidential” reflection. Such opportunities are very rare now. Twitter is no longer a 24-hour instrument of Trump-hate, and the collusion of the politicized FBI with Trump-haters has been well-established and leaves the public much less credulous to this sort of comment that it was four years ago. Some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal press antagonists have gone.

In 2020 the Democrats were able to play the George Floyd tragedy both ways. Somehow, Mr. Trump was in league with those who would brutally assault African-Americans. Yet the widespread rioting that followed that horrible incident and caused up to $2 billion of damage, according to Axios, injured hundreds of people, and led to dozens of deaths across the country were in no way the responsibility of the Democratic mayors who were completely ineffectual at restoring order. It was all cracked up to the chaos of the Trump era. All the country had to do was get rid of Mr. Trump and there would be no more riots.

Covid was a godsend for Mr. Trump’s enemies. He made the mistake of effectively taking over the commission in charge of which he had put Vice President Pence, and the Democrats blamed him for dragging his feet on the shutdowns which Democrats demanded in order to create an economic depression which they could then blame on Mr. Trump. With the collusion of the press, they gave Mr. Trump no credit for the remarkable swiftness of his response to the crisis, providing more hospital beds than were needed and moving emergency hospital ships into position where in fact there was no requirement for them. 

They gave him no credit for producing a vaccine three years ahead of what had been predicted. Best of all in the Covid area, the Democrats had an excuse for keeping Mr. Biden in his basement and away from voters. When he did speak he was contending, often unsuccessfully, to make his voice heard over “the Canadian geese” as he described them, in his garden.   

And there were the voting and vote-counting rule changes undertaken in the professed interest of assuring as large a turn-out as possible in the election despite Covid restrictions. Many of these changes were not undertaken, as the Constitution requires, by the state legislatures, but rather by authority of the state governors or state courts. The judiciary refused to hear and try on its merits any of the 19 lawsuits that were taken challenging the constitutionality of material changes to the election process. 

It is a national disgrace that the American press have practically unanimously pretended that there is no possible question of the validity of the election result. More than 40 percent of ballots were not cast on election day in the voting place by the voter whose name is on the ballot. It is clear that in an election where millions of unsolicited ballots were mailed out to voters — raising concerns about ballot harvesting, and that if 50,000 votes were flipped in Pennsylvania and two other states Mr. Trump would have won, there is a serious question about the integrity of the result. The press deny this and pretend Trump’s only challenge to the authenticity of the 2020 election results were the somewhat unserious efforts of Rudolph Giuliani and, on her own account, Sidney Powell.

The aversion of the Democrats to making the voting system more resistant to vote-rigging was demonstrated in changes in Georgia which Mr. Biden represented as a return to segregation and the denial of the rights of African-Americans to vote. The 2018 election results exposed these complaints as unfounded and substantially addressed the problems that gave rise to the voting controversy in Georgia in 2020. Other states have taken similar steps and it may be assumed that the absence of Covid restrictions will produce more indisputable election results. There were no substantial allegations of abuse in the midterm elections last year.

Neither Mr. McCarthy nor any other serious legal commentator, however hostile they may be to Mr. Trump, seriously claims that the prosecution of the former president in New York over the Stormy Daniels affair and the possible further prosecutions in respect of the Georgia election, the events on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, and whatever documents the former president took with him when he departed the White House, are not politically inspired. 

This ultimate clincher in the Democratic playbook has already failed. The country knows that this is an abuse of the justice system and the deliberate criminalization of opponents to smear and destroy them. As I’ve written here before, this is the last stop on the route that began with the destruction of the very successful Nixon presidency, that had recently been reelected by the greatest plurality in American history, over the absurdly trivial Watergate matters.

And finally, Mr. Trump will have the advantage of running against an administration that is appallingly vulnerable on its record: high inflation, vertiginous deficits, minimal progress in real income for scores of millions of Americans, an open southern border that has been crossed by millions of illegal immigrants and quantities of fentanyl that kill approximately 200 Americans a day, all in league with the most violent and dangerous crime gangs in the world in northern Mexico. 

The green program has squandered energy self-sufficiency, unnecessarily raised costs, and has amounted to a war on the petroleum industry: all in pursuit of goals that have not been proved to be either attainable or desirable. The assistance to Ukraine has been commendable but there is no sign of an exit strategy. Most forecasts are of a recession. The debacle in Afghanistan is totally inexcusable. This is the record the Democrats will have to defend.

Political conditions are always highly changeable. Today, Mr. Trump is the clear favorite to win the Republican nomination, is already narrowly leading Mr. Biden in the polls, and on what can be seen, is likely to do that next election day.