The reason that the anti-Trump campaign among Republicans has largely collapsed is not because the former president’s rivals had no talent, were not presentable, or failed to try hard to derail his renomination. Events in the Republican nomination race have taken the turn that they have for two principal reasons.

President Trump has the incomparable legitimacy of having probably won the 2020 election, and of having been the victim of an absolute refusal of the judiciary at any level to weigh on the merits the constitutional questions about the integrity of the 2020 election result, while the national political press unanimously refers to Mr. Trump’s questions about that result as “lies.” 

It is indicative of how wobbly the legitimacy of that election is to its ostensible winners, that when Mr. Trump raises his objections to the millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots that were sent out to voters, raising concerns about ballot harvesting and ballots that could not be verified, in an election where 50,000 flipped votes in three states would have changed the result, all his concerns are “lies.”

It is necessary for the anti-Trumpers in both parties to exclude from consideration the likelihood that the election of President Biden was illegitimate; they do not have the self-confidence of the Kennedys in 1960 or the Bushes in 2000 to acknowledge that the election was so close either side might have won and the contest was effectively a coin-toss.

Since there have been other dubious election results in American history, particularly in 1876, the reason for this unwillingness to admit the obvious must be the fervent ambition to pretend that the Trump terror was over: a meteoric interlude that briefly darkened the skies of the 95 percent Democratic District of Columbia, where both sides come to bat alternately but the government is Democratic and moves ever to the left.

The second reason for Mr. Trump’s invincibility among Republicans is related to the first: the Mr. Trump that Trump-haters hate is no longer visible. The Washington political establishment, big donors: the entire national political press, the political class of both parties, the lobbyists and almost all whom they represent, were so horrified at the prospect of the disruption of their log rolling, back scratching operation, that they vilified Mr. Trump far beyond what he deserved. 

What he did deserve was a considerable reservation among  thoughtful people due to his sometimes boorish and boastful conduct and what he calls his “constructive hyperbole,” but his critics refer to as compulsive untruthfulness. Readers will recall that almost every day the former president’s tweets had to be walked back by his entourage and he frequently made it easy for his opponents to portray him as a Philistine with some penchant for extremism.

Today, he is remembered as an effective president in circumstances made horribly difficult by his enemies who mobilized the FBI and the intelligence agencies to present scurrilous and defamatory falsehoods commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign as authentic intelligence. The alleged collusion between Mr. Trump and the Russians, like the complaints and spurious impeachment over his telephone call to the president of Ukraine, are seen by everyone as the nasty, desperate, and illegal misconduct that they were. 

Mr. Trump has emerged in the previously unsuspected disguise of a courageous underdog fighting an avalanche of legally unfounded political persecutions conducted by what is constitutionally required to be an impartial system of justice. It is uncommon to consider a billionaire and an ex-president to be an underdog, but that is what Mr. Trump now is in the correlation of forces. 

He has vastly improved his tactical game to ensure less abrasiveness and he has added greatly to his stature by fighting legally against grossly illegal oppression. It is, to use contemporary jargon, a better look, and he is a much stronger candidate. All the deluded advice of the past four years from anti-Trump commentators telling the Republicans to show more courage and less interest in Mr. Trump’s endorsement, confirms that they have been somnambulating through a political fairyland. This must finally be ending.                              

All indications are that the Democratic bosses who rescued Mr. Biden from the ditch where he had been left by the New Hampshire primary four years ago and parachuted him in ahead of the unelectable socialist, Senator Sanders, who was placated by the adoption of his socialist platform, are in a state of five-alarm panic. 

Since they never accepted the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s a victory in 2016, they never doubted that they could harass it effectively and end it prematurely, and for nearly three years since the 2020 election they conducted a wild dance of celebration over their own virtuosity in overthrowing Mr. Trump, resurrecting Mr. Biden, placating Mr. Sanders, and generally assuring the indefinite continuation of their corrupt bipartisan license to misgovern the country. 

They all finally realize now that the Biden administration is vulnerable in almost every major policy area. Scrambling to get something in place on immigration, the economy, or the war and threats of war abroad at this late date will not be like falling off a log. All the Democrats have now is Trump=Hitler, and not even with the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, conducting the lesson, will America sign on to that; there is nothing wrong with making the country great again.

This election cycle started out with the Democrats jubilating that Mr. Trump was dead politically, then that there would be such Republican division, the election itself would be simple, then that “Biden beat him before, he can do it again,” as if there was not a doubt in the world about the 2020 election, and Mr. Trump was incapable of raising his game, and Mr. Biden was the moderate and competent adult in the room that was promised in 2020. 

The Democrats thoroughly deserve to be in the box they are in now: their conduct in the last two presidential elections has been an outrage and they foisted upon the country the most inadequate administration since before the Civil War. These last three years have been an appalling chapter of incompetence in government and venality in politics. It is coming down to a referendum over whether the public is more appalled by the corruption and politicization of the criminal prosecution service or by the prospect of the return to office of a president who is now generally seen to have been capable but afflicted by stylistic infelicities. 

As we get closer to the election, the world becomes more complicated, a Trump victory seems more likely and the number of those who have to hold their noses to vote for him steadily declines. If he regains the presidency, his victory over those who perverted justice to try to decide the presidency will, when cant and emotionalism subside, be seen as a watershed moment in the reinforcement of American constitutional democracy.