In football, a disastrous season results in ownership firing the coach. Owners don’t, at least after season’s end, blame referees, rules, second-stringers, field conditions, and inconsequential plays called in the second quarter of the fifth game for a losing record. They blame the most powerful guy with the greatest sway over the team’s direction.

In politics, football by other means, the owners — the people who constitute the party — do everything to avoid firing the “coach.” This is especially true if he once won a big game. The phenomenon helps explain why teams in politics can endure numerous disastrous campaign seasons helmed by the same leader — or even the same type of leader — before they call for a change. Lame excuses, to include Russia stole the election or he’s an illegitimate president because he was really born in Kenya, rob parties of the ability to learn from mistakes.

Republicans lost another set of elections on Tuesday. Instead of winning control of the Virginia General Assembly, they lost it. They lost a winnable governor’s race in Kentucky. In Ohio, progressives rolled back gains made by complacent pro-lifers suddenly shy about full-throatedly opposing the powerful annihilating the powerless typical of might-makes-right barbarism.

This follows the red wave becoming a red whimper in 2022, the 2021 Georgia runoff in which Donald Trump made Chuck Schumer majority leader by playing ventriloquist to two U.S. senator dummies mouthing his 2020 grievances, 2020 witnessing just the third defeat of a Republican president in a century, and the shellacking of 2018.

For those grateful to Donald Trump for appointing constitutionalist judges, recognizing our soldiers as neither the world’s policemen nor its social workers, and understanding a country without borders isn’t a country, the reckoning that the high-rise builder stinks as a party builder comes as a painful one.

His manner of energizing his base by antagonizing the Democrat base helps explain the orange-alert engagement of the opposition even for off-year elections. They hate him more than MAGA loves him.

Fixating on personal grievances regarding 2020 rather than fixing the country’s problems, like the jilted Miss Havisham wearing her wedding dress every day, alienates many inclined to vote Republican. Acceptance of his view of 2020 as a stolen election — rather than one he blew by making Anthony Fauci the president — as a precondition for his support in primaries ensured Republican defeat in general elections. No fair, you cheated works as a psychological trick to salve fragile egos. It does not work to put losers back into the win column.

Rather than build the party’s stable of stars, he insecurely bashes them. He called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp a “fool” and a “clown” for not indulging his Stacey Abrams–like fantasy that he really won his state: “Of course, having her I think might be better than having your existing governor, if you want to know the truth,” before the Kemp–Abrams rematch. “Might very well be better.” He recruited the politician whose career in the Senate he doomed to primary Kemp.

Glenn Youngkin winning in 2021 by moving away from Trump provoked the former president to tell his social-media followers that Virginia’s new governor’s name “Sounds Chinese.” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds endorsing rival Ron DeSantis meant, to Trump, “the end of her political career in that MAGA would never support her again.” Days after Ron DeSantis’ Florida became the one bit of sunshine amid a gloomy 2022 midterm election, Trump bizarrely labeled him “an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations.”

They bailed not on abortion or immigration or taxes but on the only issue that really constitutes apostasy to Trump: Trump.

Trump remains a charismatic figure with good policy ideas and the courage to withstand inevitable leftist onslaughts. One grasps why he engenders a following. Coming to grips with why this following cannot countenance any criticism of their favored candidate proves a more difficult task. Heresies against people and not principles exist in cult of personalities, so acknowledging his utter failure as a party leader hopefully strikes as an unpleasant truth rather than a precursor to excommunication.

Ironically, Donald Trump compelling Republicans to turn the page from that stale GOP of Bush-Romney-McCain based upon aggressively invading other countries and passively allowing other countries invade our southern border stands as his greatest gift to the party. More recently, he takes away more than he gives. Wisdom commands Republicans to learn from that earlier Trump rather than learn the hard way from the don’t-blame-me iteration.