Jonathan Martin of Politico has some thoughts about the inevitability of Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. He reports on a growing fatalism within conservative ranks that nothing can stop the twice-impeached, once indicted ex-president. Yet, he wants to remind us that the picture a year out from an election often is distorted.

2024 could look a lot like 2020. That was when we in the political press corps dumped oceans of ink on the ideological differences among the candidates, questions about their specific policy proposals (will Elizabeth Warren release her own healthcare plan, inquiring minds didn’t want to know) only to cover a race that effectively turned on a single question: Who can win the general election? Democrats were effectively single-issue voters and their bet on President Joe Biden paid off in November.

I might add that the press corp also spilled a tremendous amount of ink in 2008 on the differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s health care plans, only to discover that it made not one whit of difference to the outcome of the contest between them.  As for 2020, we shouldn’t forget that Biden won the nomination primarily because he had strong support from the black community, and his perceived electability wasn’t the only factor they considered.

Still, Biden definitely looked like the safest bet to beat Trump to the broad Democratic electorate, so Martin’s point can stand. If you think back on my relentless coverage of those primaries, I predicted Biden’s eventual victory (in both the primaries and the general) from beginning to end. My analysis showed the same consistent confidence in Obama in 2008.

I don’t have that same confidence today. The one thing I know is that Trump’s legal woes are building and we’re going to spend most of the time between now and next spring watching all that get adjudicated. How Trump looks today is not how he will look on the back end of this process, and we certainly shouldn’t expect any policy distinctions between Trump and his rivals to play a meaningful role in influencing the Republican electorate on who they should nominate for president. We should start with the possibility that he’ll be in prison.

What we know is that Republican voters still like Trump and still want him to be president. Some may support a different candidate for practical reasons, believing Trump can’t be elected. We certainly saw plenty of that with Democrats whose first choice was Bernie Sanders but didn’t believe he could win and so backed Biden or someone else. The more erosion Trump gets among this type of voter, the worse his chances. For example, he could soon be held liable for committing rape. That’s not something that screams “electability!”

I think the uncertainty comes from the behavior of the Republican Party which seems to understand that the abortion issue is killing their chances of winning swing states and districts but is nonetheless racing forward with ever more restrictive laws. They are not behaving like winning future elections is a top priority.  They want to use the power they have while they have it, damn the consequences. Anyone depending on the Republican base having a survival instinct doesn’t have a lot to support their faith.

Would the base nominate Trump again even if he’s in prison? That I can ask that question without being laughed out of town tells you all you need to know. The problem isn’t Trump but something that he inspired and unleashed.

Looking at the situation, a GOP strategist told Martin, “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”

I think the key to that analogy is the premise that first everything must be destroyed and only then can the GOP get back to practical politics. It’s another way of saying that the MAGA beast must be fed, and all efforts to tame them are futile.

It’s a compelling picture and quite possibly accurate, but I don’t have complete confidence in it. I think Trump’s upcoming problems are going to play out in ways that actually shake the status quo up and change it before the Republican National Convention in 2024. I think it will be almost impossible to make the case that Trump is a viable candidate, and electability will become more of a factor than it is today.

At the same time, were he to secure the nomination, I think people have to consider the possibility that he could win. A lot would have to go wrong with the world between now and then for it to happen, but there’s a lot that could go wrong.