Will Donald Trump run again for a second term? He does tease it quite a lot, and that has some conservatives worried. “Donald Trump? In 2024?” asks political analyst Charles C.W. Cooke. “Why on earth would conservatives choose that guy?”

I’m serious: Why? Why would we do that when we have a choice? The idea should be absurd, risible, farcical, outré. It should be a punchline, a mania, the preserve of the demented fringe. Politics matters. And because politics matters, it is a bad idea to allow politics to be held hostage by someone who, in his heart of hearts, doesn’t really care. Donald Trump is an extraordinarily selfish man, and he is only too happy to subordinate your interests to his own. Why let him? It is one thing to say, “Well, he may have been a fickle boor, but I liked some of what he did once he was in office”; it’s quite another to put yourself through four more years of the man when you don’t have to. Whatever justification there may have been for picking the “lesser of two evils” in the 2016 or 2020 general election — a justification that was a great deal stronger before Trump refused to accept, and then tried to overturn, the results of the latter — it cannot obtain in 2022.

This has nothing to do with wanting Joe Biden to be president, he explains. If the question is, “Given a free choice, who do you want to run against Joe Biden?” he says his answer will be, “A Republican who is likely to win — and who, if he wins, will not be an insane mess.” He asks, “Is that not yours?”

And please don’t tell me that the GOP should choose Trump again because “he fights.” The Republican Party now has a whole host of other candidates who “fight,” and none of them come with Trump’s baggage, his torpidness, his ill-discipline, his self-indulgence, his abject disregard for our constitutional order, or his pathological, unyielding, surrealistic dishonesty. What, pray tell, did Donald Trump say as president that Ron DeSantis wouldn’t have? What law did he sign that Greg Abbott would have vetoed? Which of the judicial picks that the Federalist Society prepared for him would have been rejected by Tim Scott or Marco Rubio or Kim Reynolds? Trump’s apologists tend to cast him as an unfortunate package deal: You want the policy, you get the lunacy, too. But that isn’t true anymore — if it ever was. Embrace the glorious future, in which you are no longer obliged to tie the agenda you favor to a hand grenade.

He concludes rather harshly:

The United States is an enormous and well-populated country, and it really ought to be able to do better than to run a second election between Joe frickin’ Biden and Donald frickin’ Trump. Change, not re-runs, ought to be the GOP’s theme. Change — away from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Change — away from blowhards in their late 70s. Change — away from political leaders who do not do the required reading and who can barely string a sentence together. Donald Trump has spent the last 15 months pretending that he won the 2020 presidential election because he understands that, in the modern era, a nominee who loses an election is a nominee who does not get picked to run again. The Republican Party did not go back to Gerald Ford in 1980, or to George H. W. Bush in 1996, or to Bob Dole in 2000, or to John McCain in 2012, or to Mitt Romney in 2016, and it should not go back to Donald Trump in 2024.

The man lost. He’s a loser. It’s time we picked a winner for a change.

We’ll offer one significant counterpoint: Trump had a remarkable record of achievement as president. He earned a second term, hands down. And the country would be far better off right now if he were still president.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.