It’s been nearly three months since Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia, and I swear by everything holy that his surprise election win has had an aphrodisiac effect on all the old normie Republicans who had previously bent the knee to Donald Trump. Prior to the Youngkin election, Trump-style politics was such an overwhelming presence in the G.O.P. that the political futures of Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Pompeo, among others, seemed to exist only in some parallel universe where Trump was barely a factor. But after a year of full-fledged Trump deplatforming, a handful of second-tier opportunists are quietly burnishing their resumes in anticipation of the moment that the former president steps aside… or potentially falters.

Last week, I described how Trump’s disappearance from social media had allowed DeSantis to cultivate his own Trumpy political identity without the ever-present threat of a cyberbullying campaign. But this void has also been enobling for two other figures who, I’d initially supposed, had been written out of the Republican firmament altogether for their various sins: Pompeo, for being a Koch lackey and war hawk, at odds with the populist base; and Pence, for infuriating Trump and the MAGA diehards by certifying Joe Biden’s election.