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Now is the summer of Republican content.

The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trumps legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage if they didnt actually help him.

Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?

In short, Republicans have good reason to think theyll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.

Three in particular: First, Trump wont slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trumps second-term personnel wont be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results wont be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.

Begin with the left.

Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and theyll tell you that Peak Woke that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to abolish the police and the mostly peaceful protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyds murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trumps presidency, then abated after Bidens election.

Thats no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to resist. With his every tweet, Trumps presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. Thats also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.

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Opinion | Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term - The New York Times