The suspicious timing of the federal indictment issued to former President Donald Trump last Thursday, which landed only hours following fresh and damning revelations of Biden family corruption, shouldn’t surprise anyone. The working partnership between the Democratic Party, the intelligence community, the legacy news media, and Big Tech has been firmly established. This is who they are and what they do.

And this is hardly the worst stunt they’ve pulled. The Hunter Biden laptop affair, during which they tricked the American public into believing that evidence of Biden family corruption was actually a Russian psyop two weeks before a national election, was their Mona Lisa. Every participant played their part to perfection: the legacy news media read from the intelligence community script; Big Tech suspended the accounts of reporters who dared to report the truth; and the Democratic nominee for president used the line that had been carefully crafted for him by these allies to squash legitimate questions about his family’s affairs. It was masterful, worthy of an achievement award for scoundrels.

But for my money, they could have kept the Trump indictment in their back pocket for an even more conveniently timed release. Last week’s revelation of a $10 million dollar bribe scheme involving the Bidens ($5 million for Hunter and $5 million for “the Big Guy”) and Ukrainian oil firm Burisma was never destined to break through the American information bubble. Not even the spy thriller-worthy details of the Biden-Burisma scheme, which involved a sitting vice-president altering U.S. foreign policy to remove an anti-corruption prosecutor at Burisma's behest, could pose a threat to the Left’s ironclad control of the narrative.

That’s partly because of their grip on the flow of information, but also because the Republican Party pathologically insists on featuring its least capable messengers at crucial junctures. Rather than feature any number of the bright, young pols who form the deep GOP bench, the party inexplicably opts for public advocates who are abhorrent to the majority of Americans.

When the Biden-Burisma story broke, I quickly turned on the news to see whose face the GOP would use to convey the gravity of these revelations to the public. It was both depressing and unsurprising to see Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) face out in front of the press scrum.

If the GOP had searched far and wide for a less capable and credible messenger for such an important mission, it would have doubtless come up empty. Greene’s national approval rating is in the low 20s. She is most well known to the public for cupping her hands over her mouth and shouting during the State of the Union, like a WWE fan on her fourth can of Keystone. She recently made headlines by comparing Trump to Jesus .

If she is the messenger, the quality of the GOP message simply doesn’t matter. It’s impossible to win like this.

Until the GOP acknowledges their shoddy messenger problem, they won’t reclaim power no matter how favorable the circumstances. The political climate for the 2020 midterm elections couldn’t have been more favorable to Republicans. But they failed to capitalize for the simple reason that most Americans think they’re crazy. Given their insistence on elevating figures such as Greene, it’s easy to see why.

It should be noted that when it comes to the Trump indictment, Democrats will have a “messenger” problem of their own. High-profile Democratic operatives such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), not to mention the entire newsrooms of the New York Times and Washington Post, spent years insisting on the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, which has since been utterly discredited. In generations prior, they would no longer be able to show their faces in public, let alone host a cable news show or launch a campaign for the U.S. Senate.

But Democrats today are never made to atone for their errors because they have all of the cultural power — their allies in corporate America, Hollywood, and every other major cultural institution reinforce their messaging as a matter of reflex.

In order to effectively counter their misdeeds, Republicans need to be smarter, stronger, and more disciplined. They need better messengers at crucial moments. They need to start caring about appearances again.

If not, it’s all a bunch of hot air.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.