American democracy was an interesting experiment. Well done for lasting this long. Glad I’m not you guys. I shall continue watching the car wreck.

It has become commonplace to emphasize the extent to which the US political world is polarized. Politicians and partisans of each party don’t simply have differing solutions to the country’s problems — they often seem to live in separate and fundamentally incompatible versions of reality. But on one thing, nearly everyone can agree: Donald Trump is still the center of the country’s political universe.

Trump is cruising to victory in the Republican presidential primary despite barely campaigning and remaining the subject of numerous major criminal and civil trials. GOP voters strongly preferred him over Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who essentially ran on Trump’s program, but with fewer personal scandals and a severe charisma deficit. DeSantis dropped out in January, as did Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor whose more strongly anti-Trump campaign barely registered.

Last week, Trump won 60 percent of the vote to defeat Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent, in her home state of South Carolina. He went on to beat her with 68 percent of the vote in Michigan a few days later. Whatever Haley’s motives for remaining in the race through Super Tuesday (March 5, when fifteen states will hold primary elections), there is next to zero hope that anyone besides Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee. The Supreme Court’s decision today to reverse Colorado’s move to exclude the former president from the ballot just delivered the Trump campaign even more good news.

Even Joe Biden appears to be letting Donald Trump set the agenda for political discussion in the presidential election. Despite four years of incumbency, the president has largely focused his reelection campaign on Trump — in particular the threats he poses to democracy and abortion rights, as well as the many instances of legal jeopardy in which Trump is entangled.