Trump still does good polls among Republicans, but according to a Pew poll in October, about half do not want him to stand again. In November, the Des Moines Register’s widely respected Iowa poll found that 61% of Republicans in Iowa said they were more aligned with the party than with Trump, while only 26% said they were ‘they were more aligned with Trump than with the party.

And, of course, there was the big GOP victory in Virginia last month, led by gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin. The message for Republicans in competitive states: Don’t repudiate Trump, but don’t over-embrace him either, and more Republicans and Independents hostile to Trump will come back into the GOP fold.

Part of it is Trump’s fault. He reserves most of his passion for his false claims about election theft. And while he has persuaded a dismaying number of Republicans to tell pollsters they think the 2020 election was “rigged,” the only pundits and politicians who are still talking about it are fringe figures, like the tycoon. pillow Mike Lindell, fooling true believers for donations and clicks. Trump’s new social media startup looks like a similar, larger-scale effort. Even Rupert Murdoch told him to move on.

Now it’s easy to tell the opposite story – that Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party and the presumed candidate if he runs. We hear it constantly because there is a strange convergence between the pro-Trump media and the anti-Trump media; they share an obsession with Trump’s grip on the GOP. The Lincoln Project’s anti-Trump group is practically begging Trump to run again.