President Trump’s successful dispatch of Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican gadfly, came quickly as no surprise. Massie was all but doomed to lose Tuesday night’s primary the moment Trump endorsed his opponent, Ed Gallrein.

Massie’s passionate libertarian following has an outsized presence on social media, where his splashy but inconsequential brand of politics finds a natural home. He enjoyed playing David versus Goliath, and to his credit, Massie played his part to the end. Well, almost. On primary day, he came under fire from Trump for making it appear as if he still had Trump’s endorsement, when he did not.

That endorsement flew out the window when Massie became a useful idiot to the left, opting to find common ground with Democrats on the grossly exaggerated Epstein scandal, which turned into a frenzy last summer that led nowhere conclusive. Democrats gleefully embraced Massie’s support in the witch hunt, along with that of MAGA defector Marjorie Taylor Greene, who shares Massie’s obsession with conspiracies over partisan confrontation.

Since breaking free from Trump’s “grip” and taking flight on a philosophical journey, Greene has dared to ask whether Trump staged the assassination attempt against him in Butler, a question being posed by some of our “friends” on the left. Like the Epstein brainworm, the idea that Trump is masterfully orchestrating attempts on his life, apparently every couple of months, has become something of a popular delusion. It is easy to see why liberals may choose to believe this nonsense, but why anyone on the right should bother is a mystery. Anyway, such is the “threat” Marjorie Taylor Greene poses to the system.

Massie and Greene represent a neutered form of populism distinct from Trump’s. It is in the spotlight, but not in the arena. It imitates Trump’s pugnaciousness but lacks the bite. It dominates podcasts and is always “asking questions,” but it never delivers results. It is hardly a wonder that regime-approved media, such as the New York Times, have taken a partisan motivated liking to this wing of the right lately. On the other hand, the elites’ hatred of Trump remains real and profound. Democratic prosecutors tried to put Trump in prison, and he has survived more assassination attempts than any of his predecessors. At the current rate, he will prove more invincible than Rasputin.

Politicians who gesture grandly about rising above politics exploit popular discontent with “the system,” but this is a dangerous path for the right to traverse. To second Scott Greer in a recent piece at Chronicles, today there are almost no meaningful issues on which left and right can find common ground and calls to “unify” should be met with skepticism. While a libertarian like Massie was never truly on the same page as conservatives, there is little for a limited government type to find attractive about today’s Democrats. As Greer correctly points out, Democrats are not really invested in stopping the war with Iran, even if they find it convenient to make that case in public. This is in stark contrast to their burn-it-down approach to breaking Trump’s anti- immigration regime, which they view, accurately, as a real threat to their long-term goals of political conquest.

The two-party process is among the most frequent targets of the politically uninformed, the cowardly, or the merely bored observer, who does not know or does not wish to believe that politics is a nasty business with meaningful stakes, and prefers to regard it as a pointless, if sometimes entertaining, diversion. But Trump offers plenty of drama, while delivering real “Ws,” as the kids say. The redistricting battle that he launched last year has, in a surprising turn, tilted in his party’s favor since the courts intervened to stop Virginia’s power grab, and there is a glimmer of hope that Republicans will hold onto the House in November.

For a certain, chronically online, type of person, midterm elections aren’t important enough to warrant serious attention. But if Republicans want to save the country, they must follow Trump’s lead and continue to proscribe the grandstanders in their camp.