Donald Trump announced over the weekend that he would not attend Wednesday’s first Republican-primary debate on Fox News. Instead, he will counterprogram with a pre-taped interview with Tucker Carlson, presumably to air first on the latform formerly known as Twitter. (The interview has apparently already been taped well in advance of the debate; Tucker’s a good choice as an interlocutor because you can always count on him to edit out your most incoherent and morally depraved moments and deceptively present you as sane, at least when it serves his interests.) Trump then doubled down a day later, announcing that as the clear front-runner for the nomination, he would not be doing any debates at all during the primary season. It is the arrogant, infuriatingly high-handed decision of a man unwilling to subject himself to cross-examination by his opponents, questions from the voters, tongue-kisses from Vivek Ramaswamy, and potential moments of televised weakness.

It is also a perfectly intelligent, sound strategy, one I would have recommended myself if I were advising him (in good faith, that is). Trump is playing a “prevent defense” for at least one manifestly obvious reason: because he is, at this point, lapping the field in all polls. He instead campaigns through a series of steadily paced public appearances — rallies, dinner speeches, convention appearances and the like — that give his campaign a leisurely pace compared with the hyperactivity of his rivals. He has this luxury, because his rivals have to both introduce themselves nationally and statewide and then make a case against the ex-president. He merely has to go out there and shore up his brand in a few key states by showing the colors for an hour and a half at a time. Since it would be political malpractice for him to do otherwise, at least until his numbers show some sign of dipping, it can hardly be surprising that he has chosen to run his campaign this way.

The question then becomes: Is he dialing down the frequency of campaign events because of health concerns, or because he is afraid of being exposed too much and visibly “slipping” mentally the way Joe Biden has? (Grumbling to this effect has circulated around Twitter from frustrated partisans for months now.) I must conclude not, and the reason is that I have just rewatched video of every single Donald Trump campaign appearance — as opposed to arraignment — since the day he first announced his campaign on November 25, 2022. (Imagine suffering Alex’s fate in A Clockwork Orange except, for some inexplicable masochistic reason, voluntarily inflicting it upon yourself.) What I’m struck first by is how few of them there are — I was able to subject myself to such needless torment because, all told, Trump has only made twelve such substantive appearances since he announced his presidential candidacy in November, and he did only two before late June.

But what I am struck more by is how, unlike Joe Biden in every one of his public appearances since 2021, Trump doesn’t really show much diminution in his public-speaking skills. This is a neutral assessment: If you thought that Donald Trump had the public-speaking ability of a low-rent carnival barker in the first place, rest assured: He still talks the same way. When he is in full flow at a rally, rambling on for anywhere from one to two hours, he still has the same energy, which is critically important for his partisans. (The various things Donald Trump might say at any given appearance are functionally insane, obviously, but then again this has been the case for well over a decade now.) The point is that he does not come across, as Biden does, as if he is slipping a gear mentally.

It is this visible strength — every bit as much as the indictments — that fortifies his polling numbers and makes Trump’s semi-reclusive campaign strategy presently sustainable. You can call it a variation on Joe Biden’s “basement campaign” of 2020, and in some sense it is. But then again (1) that worked for Joe Biden in 2020; (2) Trump is significantly more energetic and vigorous on the stump, which is enough for his voters. That he makes far fewer public campaign appearances than his rivals plays far more as the insolent prerogative of Trumpian arrogance — and not-so-secretly thrills his fans, who want a hero to worship — than it does of a man trying to hide physical unwellness.

Of course that brings us to the other major consideration in play: the impending tsunami of court appearances for Trump’s various legal jeopardies. Here’s a look at Trump’s future legal and political calendar if you enjoy reading horror stories where all the lead characters die at the end. These dates are tentative to be sure — expect Trump’s lawyers to seek to delay as much as possible — but nevertheless try not to choke back an ironic sigh upon noticing that Trump is currently set to go up on trial in the slam-dunk Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case in late May of 2024, long after the primary has been settled. (Be of good cheer: Georgia state prosecutors want Trump’s election-interference case to begin on March 4, 2024 — the day before Super Tuesday, that is — and they haven’t even scheduled Jack Smith’s federal Georgia election case yet.)

So this sort of methodically paced “basement-plus” campaign is going to become a necessity in the 2024 general election due to his various court appearances and trials; the man simply is not going to have either the time or the money to spend flying around to make appearances with the sort of frequency that unindicted presidential candidates do. Setting aside the reality that Trump is irredeemably toxic to nearly 65 percent of the general voting public — this race is functionally over the moment Trump is formally nominated unless Biden himself has a major medical event — it is rather poor campaign strategy to exchange rallying voters in rural Michigan for holding rallies on the federal courthouse steps. To return to the Biden “basement campaign” comparison, that might have worked for him — but only in 2020, and only because of Covid-19. It wouldn’t again except, in a supremely cruel irony, against one and only one potential opponent: Donald Trump.

One could make the argument that Trump owes more to America than to comfortably sit on his lead, turning the Republican primary into a queasy yet largely unchallenged coronation then immediately exchanging that for a season-long referendum by the general electorate on whether he should be prison. (He will be displeased with the audience’s answer.) But then Donald Trump has never been a man who thinks he owes anything to the Republican Party or “conservatism” — again, this is actually why some of his fans support him. He is in this both for pride and as a way of funding and fortifying his legal and public defense. He calls the tune here, and while he is running a brutally effective campaign strategy in the primary, it doesn’t take a seer to predict that both he and the Republican Party will be destroyed by that same strategy when taken to the general election two Novembers from now.