“The official campaign for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination is barely three weeks old, but there is one clear takeaway so far: Donald Trump is running against himself—and losing.

”From his low-energy announcement speech at Mar-a-Lago to his dinner with the Hitler-praising Kanye West and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Trump has courted more controversy than votes since launching his bid in November. He has held no campaign rallies and hired no campaign manager. He has hosted a QAnon conspiracy theorist and helped raise money for the indicted insurrectionists of January 6th. More classified items have been found in his possession, and his Trump Organization was convicted in New York of a major tax-fraud scheme. He has scared away neither prospective opponents nor prosecutors, and, while openly courting extremists, he seems to be running on a campaign platform that is somehow even more nakedly driven by self-interest than his previous two bids. Just last week, he suggested jettisoning the Constitution so he could be reinstated to the office he was thrown out of by the voters in 2020. ... Has there ever been a more awful start to a campaign?

“For all of that, it's not clear just what kind of Trump car crash we're watching. Is this the end-end of Trump, the long-anticipated Republican jailbreak? Or merely another moment when the false hope of Trump's imminent demise is indulged for a few days or weeks before being once again disproved? ... For all the breathless coverage, Trump retains the support of more than 40% of the G.O.P. electorate in recent surveys—more than enough to win the Republican nomination in a crowded field.”

-- Susan B. Glasser, “Trump's 2024 Campaign So Far Is an Epic Act of Self-Sabotage; But is this really the end of an error?” on The New Yorker site