We may look back in a few months and say former President Donald Trump was destined for the GOP presidential nomination the moment he announced his second bid for a second term. The race isn’t over until it’s over, as Yogi Berra might say, but Trump is running away with it, leading by an average of 44 points in the polls.

W. James Antle III of the Washington Examiner takes a look at some of the reasons why. After reviewing the shortcomings and mistakes of the rest of the GOP field — “None have figured out how to campaign effectively against a man facing more than 90 criminal charges” — Antle gets into what Trump has done well.

A warning sign to both President Joe Biden and the other Republican candidates should have been detected in February, when Trump visited East Palestine, Ohio. The community had been the scene of a train derailment that pumped toxic chemicals into the air.

Trump beat Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to East Palestine. Biden inexplicably still hasn’t been there. While he joked about handing out Trump bottled water, the trip revealed the former president still had bottled up some of what made him such a force in 2015-16.

When Trump can overcome his true nature and think about people besides himself, he becomes formidable. He has sharp, gut-level political instincts that are frequently dulled by his grievances and paranoia. Luckily for his opponents, he can seldom suppress these self-destructive urges for very long.

But in this year’s Republican nomination fight, Trump has so far done a masterful job of making his personal problems sound to the base like something bigger than himself. The indictments and the New York trial aimed at destroying his business empire are about the two-tiered system of justice, which has been weaponized against conservatives as varied as anti-abortion activists and parents protesting at school board meetings. Even the Jan. 6 rioters are, in Trump’s parlance, “hostages,” a sign that views about the 2020 election that are widely held among the rank and file are somehow being criminalized.

Trump has likewise turned animosity with other candidates to his advantage as representative of something bigger — an issue of trust.

Trump is also showing what is for him a great deal of message discipline. The viral moments from unconventional asides — Trump imagining Biden looking at the polls and saying, “Indict the motherf***er” — and unhelpful tirades continue but at a reduced pace. Fact-checkers still have a field day going through his remarks.

But Trump has a sustained argument for why things were better when he was in office than under Biden. He maintains that the good things that are happening now, such as low unemployment and robust economic growth, were true during his term until the pandemic. The bad things, such as inflation, the border crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the war in Gaza, were not.

“All of this horror and yet Joe Biden is traveling around the country pretending he’s an economic genius — in fact, he’s an economic arsonist, and Bidenomics is incinerating American wealth in an inferno of inflation, taxation, submission, and failure,” Trump says in his stump speech.

This meshes well with public polling, and Democratic concerns, that the Bidenomics message is painting a picture of the economy that voters, especially in battleground states, do not recognize.

“The choice in this election is between a Biden economic bust and a Trump economic boom,” he says, with some variations, on the campaign trail. “Crooked Joe cares only about enriching his own family — I care about enriching your family.” …

66.2% say the country is on the wrong track compared to just 25.3% who say it is moving in the right direction. That isn’t necessarily predictive of Biden’s fortunes, especially this far out from the election. Yet it does suggest an angry and pessimistic electorate.

Anger and pessimism are conditions under which Trump thrives and incumbents usually don’t. That’s why Democrats are nervous about the polls showing them losing, however narrowly, to Trump, a man they regard as manifestly unfit for office. None of the decades of history showing candidates overcoming polling deficits when the election is a year away offer much comfort.

Antle points to one thing, however, as being “above all.”

Trump has maintained an emotional connection with his core voters that none of his competitors can rival. There are some Floridians who would similarly walk through broken glass to vote for DeSantis after witnessing his pandemic leadership. But there is also a sense in which the Florida governor is trying to intellectualize what is fundamentally a visceral phenomenon, as Trump understands.

Trump has managed to create the impression that he and his voters are in this together — the indictments, the hostile media coverage, the economic challenges, even the opposition from fellow Republicans. Each legal case, each attempt to disqualify Trump from a state ballot, only seems to strengthen his voters’ resolve. It can be a difficult thing for opponents to break.

Does that mean nominating Trump is Republicans’ best bet? Not necessarily. His legal bills alone present an enormous hurdle for a party that is routinely outspent. But ousting a really old opponent with a “slightly younger” one will also be tough — especially one who is “passionately despised by millions.” If he wins, he’s burned so many bridges that governing itself will be difficult.

Antle concludes:

The former president has been strikingly resilient in the face of adversity. But he is also at least the partial creator of most of the problems he must overcome. The case for Republicans moving on from him and taking the fight directly to Biden is nearly airtight. Yet here we are.

A Republican strategist once put it this way: “Trump may not be your cup of tea. But for now, he is the cup of tea.”

Read the whole thing here.