It’s worth remembering that most Republican voters didn’t back Donald Trump in the race for the party’s nomination in 2016. Trump came away with something like 45% of the vote in the Republican primaries; though the field had by then shrunk to just three candidates – Trump, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz – polls showed Trump struggling to hit 50% support among Republicans as late as early April of that year.

Most explanations for his victory justifiably center around his political style and the rise of the rightwing populism we’ve come to call Trumpism ⁠– though it significantly predated Trump ⁠– among a growing share of Republicans. But as a practical matter, Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 for a very simple reason: he built and kept a large minority of incredibly loyal supporters within the party, while the majority of Republican voters, who would have preferred another candidate, split their votes among too many alternatives. Had they united behind one candidate early enough in the race, Trump may well have lost. Instead, they divided themselves into defeat.

Once Trump was nominee, the vast majority of Republicans ⁠– voters, politicians, and major donors alike ⁠– dutifully set aside whatever reservations they had and backed him, even as his campaign was hit by increasingly grotesque scandals. And today, Trump, battered as he might seem, is both a former president and a demigod even to many Republicans who were wary of him in his first run. Barring dramatic, unexpected events ⁠– which, in fairness, are always a possibility with Trump ⁠– he’ll go into next year’s primary contests as an even more broadly popular and respected figure than he was in 2016, when his favorability among Republicans seldom cracked 60%.

Unlike that race’s ramshackle operation, Trump will also have a large working infrastructure of competent operatives – and state and local Republican officials across the country who back him this time around. All told, Trump should, by all rights, be even more difficult for his Republican rivals to beat next year than he was seven years ago. And that makes it all the more remarkable that the Republican elites and donors who’ve soured on him ⁠– believing, correctly, that Trump is a weak and weakening general-election candidate ⁠– seem poised to make the very same mistake that delivered him the nomination last time.

The non-Trump field has already split. Although Nikki Haley’s campaign announcement two weeks ago was seemingly forgotten by the political press almost as soon as it was made, she’ll do everything she can as the year wears on to eat into the support of likely candidate Ron DeSantis, who drew some rather inauspicious praise from former anti-Trump frontrunner and fellow Floridian Jeb Bush last week, and whoever else wants to grab a spot in the clown car next to her and also-rans-to-be Vivek Ramaswamy and Corey Stapleton.

That’s likely to include South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who made a major address in Iowa last week, and perhaps former vice-president Mike Pence, who’s been publicly mulling a bid despite his popularity within the party taking a predictable and significant hit after his refusal to assist Trump’s coup plot on January 6.

Though it might consolidate earlier than it did in 2016, Trump really ought to feel good about how crowded the field is already beginning to feel. It suggests two possibilities: either the Republican powers-that-be are inept enough to believe the field can bear another sizable slate of non-Trump candidates; or they’re ambivalent enough about Trump winning the nomination again that they don’t think lining up behind a single alternative to stop him is worth their while. Those alternatives, after all, are actively working to close the substantive gap between Trump and themselves anyhow.

Take Ron DeSantis, a man lauded by conservative elites as the anti-Trump throughout the 2022 campaign season even as he stumped for Trump’s favored and fraud-alleging candidates. His crusade against critical race theory, which takes after Trump’s broadsides against political correctness and propagandistic stunts like the 1776 Project, has predictably expanded into a proposed ideological overhaul of higher education in Florida; lax Covid policies and a crackdown on undocumented immigrants ⁠have been central to establishing what a recent DeSantis ad called a “citadel of freedom” in the Sunshine State.

And, on LGBT matters, DeSantis has arguably pulled Trump and the party back to the right. While Trump publicly professed support for the LGBT community during his administration ⁠– even as he dismantled federal protections for transgender people ⁠– DeSantis has helped force their open demonization and harassment back to the top of the social conservative agenda.

Meanwhile, Tim Scott, supposedly one of the right’s most sensitive and sensible voices, accused Democrats last week of concocting a “blueprint to ruin America”, echoing DeSantis’ rhetoric against teachers “indoctrinating your kids with radical nonsense” as well as Trump’s tough-on-crime posturing against Democrats who “demand empathy for murderers and carjackers”, even as the state sends “SWAT teams after pro-life Christians.” ⁠(This a reference to the FBI’s non-SWAT arrest of a pro-life activist who allegedly assaulted an abortion clinic volunteer at a protest.)

That mix of mendacity and vitriol is indistinguishable from Trump’s political approach ⁠– and, for that matter, from the animus behind Marjorie Taylor Greene’s case for “national divorce”. The need to compete with Trump for Trump’s voters has erased any meaningful differences between the supposedly staid establishment wing of the Republican party and Trump’s camp; those who hope to replace Trump on the ballot in the general election next year are doing all they can, whether they know it or not, to make themselves appear almost as radical and unappealing to the bulk of the general electorate – which, granted, may lose out again in the electoral college – as Trump himself does.

The fact that the candidates thus far seem unwilling to run against Trump’s actual record in office doesn’t help matters. According to Scott, the Trump administration produced “the most pro-worker, pro-family economy” of his lifetime ⁠– a sentiment that makes it hard to understand what the substantive argument against another Trump term is supposed to be. The obvious knock on him is that he was defeated in 2020 ⁠– but the conservative base isn’t going to want to hear that their preferences hurt the party, and many Republicans still don’t believe Trump really lost the election in the first place. That leaves Trump’s opponents wobbling on a tricky tightrope: trying to temper their criticisms of him and glom onto his appeal without encouraging Republican voters to consider backing the original, genuine article.

Trump, for his part, is sticking to the considerably simpler task of being Donald Trump. He managed to beat both President Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, to the scene of the East Palestine rail disaster, and used the free media attention he remains good at attracting to deliver a familiar message.

“This is really America right here,” he told the town’s conservative white working-class residents in a brief statement. “Unfortunately, as you know, in too many cases, your goodness and perseverance were met with indifference and betrayal.”

Though the political landscape has changed, that kind of rhetoric and showmanship, as empty, yet evocative, as ever, could well deliver him the nomination again ⁠– more easily than his rivals seem to appreciate.

• Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist