Accepting his party’s nomination in 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale vowed to cut the deficit with a memorable line about the tough medicine either he or Ronald Reagan would have to administer to the country.

“Let's tell the truth,” Mondale said, “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.”

Now, as Labor Day marks the final stretch of another presidential campaign, it’s time for another round of truth-telling.

The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly. GOP leaders won’t tell you that on the record. I just did.

Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.

Harris is less a doctrinaire progressive than she is up for grabs on policy, but any liberal course she takes would be constrained by a GOP-held Senate. No, that’s not a sure thing, but it’s the safest electoral bet in this turbulent election. What is virtually certain come January is that conservatives will have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, which will also serve as a check on the law and rulemaking coming out of a Democratic White House.

Harris is effectively an emergency nominee, has few policy proposals, scant governing history in Washington and a history of churning through staff. Oh, and she would be the first Democrat to enter the presidency since 1884 without majorities in both chambers, should Republicans flip the Senate.

That adds up to a recipe for gridlock — and perhaps some deal-making to fund the government and avoid across-the-board tax hikes — but not a Scandinavian social welfare state.

2026 would represent the sixth year of one party holding the presidency, always a promising midterm for the opposition. Those conditions, along with a diminished, twice-defeated Trump, would make it easier for Republicans to recruit Senate candidates.

Consider just the governors: Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, Georgia’s Brian Kemp and New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu would all be prime targets for Senate Republicans. As one GOP senator put it to me in hoping for Trump’s defeat: Who do you think would have a tougher 2026 reelection, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) under Harris or Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) under Trump?

A Democratic House majority would also be far easier for Republicans to reverse under Harris than Trump. And the GOP would almost certainly find more success in the 36 governors’ races taking place that year if they were running against the so-called six-year-itch.

For most Republicans who’ve not converted to the Church of MAGA, this scenario is barely even provocative. In fact, asking around with Republicans last week, the most fervent private debate I came across in the party was how best to accelerate Trump’s exit to the 19th Hole.

One high-level Republican, conceding it may only be “wishful thinking,” even floated the idea of a Harris victory followed by Biden pardons of both his son, Hunter, and Trump. That would take the issue of both cases off Harris’ plate and, more to the point, drain the energy behind Trump’s persecution complex so that Republicans can get on with the business of winning elections.

The broader question among Republicans: Would it be best to endure a Harris presidency to keep Trump out of power, likely for good? Or is the better way to hasten his departure from the scene for him to win so that he could only serve one more term and be done for certain in 2028?

The argument for the second of these cases being that, should he lose this year, he would once again insist he was cheated and hold out the possibility of a fourth consecutive bid, prolonging the party’s capture.

Now, this is the point to acknowledge that none of these scenarios will prove tidy, or perhaps even feasible.

As they’ve demonstrated for going on a decade now, Republican leaders will repeatedly bow to the preference of their base over their own judgment when it comes to Trump.

And if their voters aren’t looking for a reformation, well, the would-be Martin Luthers of the GOP will fare about as well as John Boehner, who liked to say: "A leader without followers is simply a guy taking a walk." (This must be the first time a founder of Protestantism and the well-tanned former speaker have been used in the same sentence.)

“You’re assuming Republicans have a top of the ticket problem and not a voter base problem,” said Terry Sullivan, a former GOP strategist. “It’s not like our leaders have been leading the voters to the wilderness against the voters’ judgment.”

Would the vast majority of Republican activists suddenly embrace their own version of the Democratic Leadership Council, which pushed Democrats toward the center after their repeated losses in the 1980s? Probably not.

Many would stew in fetid waters, believing their nominee was somehow cheated when the Democrats swapped in Harris for President Joe Biden. Those conspiracies would be nourished by, well, Trump himself and surely flourish in the closed-off information channels in which so many on the right confine themselves.

So, yes, moving past Trump in the aftermath of another defeat will hardly be easy.

But it’s essential if Republicans want to become a viable national party once more.

Just consider the history. The party has won the national popular vote only once since 1992 — and that was in 2004, when George W. Bush was running as a commander-in-chief during two wars. Bush tallied 50.7 percent of the vote, besting John Kerry by 2.4 points.

Twenty years later, Republicans have captured the presidency just once, when Trump won narrowly thanks to two third-party candidates siphoning votes. But he only netted 46 percent of the vote in 2016 and just under 47 percent in 2020.

It's not just Trump, though, it’s also the down-ballot candidates he’s foisted upon the party. Republicans vastly underperformed a promising midterm in 2022 in part because of below-replacement-level figures he elevated. And they may lose winnable races again this year — think the Senate race in Arizona and governor’s race in North Carolina — because Republicans have become overly captive to candidates in his image.

This is not all to say things are hunky-dory for Democrats. But that’s the point. Their precarious coalition is entirely dependent on sharing a common enemy, Trump, and has been for nearly a decade. Why do Republicans want to keep propping up their opposition?

The day after Trump leaves the scene, Democrats will lose their best force for unity, fundraising and enthusiasm. But they’ll have the same challenges they do today with the Electoral College, the Senate and the House and the distribution of voters therein.

Of course, it won’t be easy to kick the habit. Millions of Republican voters don’t want to go to rehab. And GOP leaders, as former Representative Thomas M. Davis (R-Va.) put it, “live in fear that their base is going to desert them.”

But the Republican who forges a hybrid coalition — a modern-day conservative fusionism — between the pre-Trump party and his enthusiasts will be rewarded. No, it can’t be anti-Trump. But it must be post-Trump.

The best case for Trump’s defeat may, predictably, be Trump himself. He’s incoherent on abortion rights, unable even to appear at a cemetery without creating a political mess and is so bothered by those who’ve suffered the wounds of war that he slights Medal of Honor recipients. And, running against a female opponent, he's pushing blowjob jokes about her and his last female opponent.

And that’s just the last two weeks.

This is to say nothing of Trump’s routine self-sabotage, mocking his advisers’ attempt to keep him on message, refusing to learn the basics of issues over nine years after he entered politics and making little effort to appeal to those in his own party who are uneasy with him.

To repurpose another resonant political line from yesteryear, Republicans should ask themselves: Had Enough?

RICHMOND, Virginia — Last summer, as Donald Trump surged and Ron DeSantis collapsed, the pleas were constant. Hardly a week went by when wealthy Republican donors, a Rupert Murdoch-owned outlet or both wouldn’t send a flare up over Virginia’s capital in hopes Gov. Glenn Youngkin would make a late entry into the GOP presidential primary.

That was then.

That was before Youngkin’s all-in effort to take full control of Virginia’s Legislature flopped, before Virginia lost the next FBI headquarters to Maryland and before Youngkin’s splashy deal to lure a new arena complex to Alexandria ended with the governor’s fellow D.C.-area dealmaker, sports owner Ted Leonsis, stating in the Washingtonian “I’m a living testament now to say it was easier, more efficient to do business in Washington, D.C., than it was in Virginia.”

And, of course, before Republican voters made clear to the party’s donor swells and Murdoch that they were quite happy, thank you very much, to nominate Trump a third consecutive time.

Now those financiers and the conservative-leaning press have made their peace, yet again, with Trump as the Republican standard-bearer. Youngkin is attempting to do the same.

He and Trump met Wednesday at the Loudoun County, Virginia, golf club that bears the former president’s name, discussing recent polling that shows Virginia potentially competitive this year. Youngkin is also appearing on Fox News to make the case for Trump rather than just criticize President Joe Biden, the preferred safe space of many elected Republicans who are uneasy with a Democratic White House but can’t advocate for a criminal defendant with a straight face.

Yet as Trump approaches a vice presidential decision in a matter of weeks, the wealthy businessman turned governor on the short list is not named Youngkin. That slot is filled by North Dakota’s Doug Burgum, who did run for president — and who also showed up in Iowa before the kickoff caucuses there to stand with Trump.

However, when the former president came to Richmond before Super Tuesday — about two months later and with the nomination effectively his — Youngkin was noticeably absent. The governor’s better option that Saturday night: Cameron Indoor Stadium for the UVa-Duke basketball game.

Trump and his top advisers were irritated by the no-show at the time and equally annoyed that Youngkin waited until after Virginia’s noncompetitive primary to endorse. And they still haven’t forgotten either snub. I was reminded as much when I asked one Trump official recently if the governor was a vice presidential prospect and got a to-the-point “no.”

Don Scott, Virginia’s Democratic House speaker, told me he spoke to Youngkin at the time. “I called him and said, ‘Thanks for at least not going to the rally,’” Scott recounted. “He just laughed, said he had other family commitments.”

Yet Republicans who are eager for Youngkin to find his way in what’s still Trump’s party believe the March episode illustrates why that may prove difficult.

“Joining the merry band of Trumpsters can’t play out when you’re the guy who takes off when Trump is in town on the eve of the primary,” said Devin O’Malley, who worked on Youngkin’s 2021 gubernatorial bid.

As O’Malley knows firsthand, navigating Trump and Trumpism has been the tension at the heart of the governor’s political identity since Youngkin emerged from the Carlyle Group boardroom to win his first campaign. It was a victory that gave Republicans of all persuasions hope just months after Trump left office in disgrace and turned over the presidency and both chambers of Congress with him. It was also a rare race in which Trump didn’t intervene in the primary and then stayed out of the general when influential Republicans successfully persuaded him not to come to Virginia before the election.

That helped Youngkin, as another of his advisers reminded me, invite voters to see what they wanted to see. Some glimpsed a mainstream, fleece-clad dad who, like them, wanted to get back to normal after Covid-19 and was a different kind of Republican from the one who just left the White House. Others caught a true conservative, devout Christian and not one of those RINOs who was a Never Trumper.

Which can be an effective way to win an election, particularly in a state that’s a bluer shade of purple. Yet it also explains why, three years later, it’s the governor of deep-red North Dakota who’s in play for vice president while Youngkin is trying to make the best of a Democratic-controlled Legislature and grasping for a legacy in one-term-and-done Virginia.

He never decided what he wanted to be. He remains torn between the main current of his party today, Trumpist grievance politics, and being the pragmatic governor of a Democratic-leaning state; between keeping his virtue intact for a future presidential primary and amassing a record to have something to sell by the time he gets to Iowa.

“It’s a fine line you have to walk,” longtime Delegate Terry Kilgore, a Republican, told me. “It’s tough.” Trying to do both is difficult, not only because of the inevitable policy tensions, but because being an effective governor with only a single four-year term takes time and commitment, particularly for a political novice.

Yet while Youngkin has been insufficiently Trumpish to please the MAGA gatekeepers, he’s also failed to forge the relationships in Richmond crucial to building a record and eventual legacy, even if it would have chiefly been breaking ground on a $2 billion sports-and-concerts Taj Mahal on the Potomac.

When I asked Kilgore what Youngkin could have done differently, the lawmaker didn’t hesitate.

“Having relationships with Democrats and some of the folks in the Legislature, we’re human beings,” he said. “People like to be — they like the governor calling them, talking to them and asking them what they think and not: ‘Here’s what I’m going to do.’”

Scott, the speaker, was even blunter about Youngkin’s failure to court State Senator L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic legislator who torpedoed the so-called Glenndome: “They thought she was invisible — I bet they see her ass now.”

Which raises the other tension within Youngkin. He won his race in part by criticizing so-called wokeness and DEI regimes. He also spent many Sundays on the campaign trail in Black churches and has made reversing the fortunes of the hard-hit, and heavily Black, city of Petersburg a personal project.

African American Democrats didn’t forget the first part, and it was always in the backdrop of the arena negotiations.

Scott, speaking about Lucas, invoked the far-right slur for DEI – Didn’t Earn It.

“This is an 80-year-old Black woman who’s been in the Legislature for 32 years, she earned her way all the way up here,” he said.

Virginia political veterans were astonished at the arena deal’s deal collapse. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), himself a former governor, told allies he couldn’t understand why Youngkin would not have flown to northern Virginia on the state plane for the arena announcement with Scott and Lucas, the key legislators in a Democratic-controlled General Assembly, in tow, according to a person familiar with the remark.

No former Virginia governors, though, are more conversant about the challenges of landing major deals than Doug Wilder and George Allen. Wilder tried to lure the team then known as the Washington Redskins across the Potomac, steps from where Youngkin’s ill-fated arena was to be built, and Allen was in conversations with Disney about a history-focused theme park near Manassas. Neither came to fruition.

Yet Youngkin didn’t extensively engage either governor about how to maneuver with Leonsis or the Legislature for his own arena project, sources in both parties told me.

This spring I went to see Wilder, who could be called the grand old man of Virginia politics but for the fact that he’s more spry at 93 than most people are at 73.

While a Democrat, the history-making former governor has longstanding relationships in both parties and, for generations now, has caused heartburn for Democrats by being as critical of them as Republicans. Youngkin wisely courted Wilder during the 2021 campaign, but as Wilder sat in his Virginia Commonwealth University office, all manner of awards and a photo of himself and Nelson Mandela on the wall, the nation’s first elected Black governor said he had not been consulted lately.

“If I were advising him — and he has not asked me for advice,” Wilder began before I interrupted to clarify that Youngkin has not sought him out.

“No, none, none,” he said, with growing emphasis on each word.

Wilder said he heard from Youngkin when the governor wanted the former governor to join him at Allen Iverson Day in Hampton, a celebration of the former NBA star who, when he was 18, received clemency from Wilder following a brawl.

“But, no, he has never picked up the phone to call me about anything,” Wilder said.

He was unsparing in his assessment of Youngkin. “He doesn’t know Virginia politics and the Virginia governorship,” said Wilder.

Allen, a Republican, was more charitable if similarly puzzled by some of Youngkin’s moves.

Youngkin sought to use the 2023 legislative races to show that Republicans had an answer on abortion post-Dobbs, that by settling on a plan to bar the procedure after, and only after, 15 weeks they could defang Democratic attacks. And if Youngkin was successful, voila, he would have modeled an abortion strategy for the whole national party to follow.

But any talk of restrictions only aided Democrats’ strategy to talk about, well, Republican-mandated restrictions. As one longtime Virginia GOP figure told me: Democrats want to talk about abortion and Trump, why do one of those two for them?

“Gov. Youngkin understands the competition between states, that Virginia has been stagnant while our neighbors are booming, and he’s trying to turn that around,” said Allen. “He could’ve made that the centerpiece of the campaign.”

Even more perplexing to many in Virginia politics is that Youngkin didn’t make a course correction after the 2023 statehouse races, that he didn’t hire a longtime Richmond hand to make the most of his final two years in divided government.

Allen’s term in Richmond was defined by abolishing parole, reforming welfare and overhauling education standards, the same as his successor, James S. Gilmore III, was known (mostly) for cutting Virginia’s car tax.

When I asked what signature accomplishment Youngkin would be known for, Allen paused, acknowledged it was a good question and then came up with what's probably the most compelling Republican case for the governor.

“If he had not been elected, Virginia would have gone over the cliff,” Allen said, pointing to the state’s relatively low tax rate, still-standing right-to-work law and the record number of vetoes Youngkin has issued.

And, the former governor added, “Youngkin’s inauguration was the liberation of Virginia from those Covid mandates.”

Put less delicately, this is the sum of most Virginia Republicans’ view of Youngkin with about a year-and-a half left on his governorship: He’s a very nice man who has been something of a disappointment but was a needed finger in the dike in a left-turning state.

There’s something else that quietly irks Virginia’s political class about Youngkin, for which his lack of relationship-building can be a euphemism: He's a thoroughly national figure. Though reared in Tidewater, his anchorage is in Washington and the global world of high finance.

All the Fox appearances set in Virginia diners, the sloganeering and even much of his staffing does not reflect the Virginia way. Mills Godwin, the only governor who served two non-consecutive terms, once said there was “no higher honor” than being Virginia’s governor. But many in Richmond have concluded Youngkin regards it as something else: a springboard.

And yet — and yet — many Republicans think he may have good reason to view it that way.

“Big sexy is gone,” said Chris Saxman, a former GOP legislator, alluding to Youngkin’s chances for a landmark legacy. “But people like him, that’s his strength, people just like him.”

As was once said of Dwight Eisenhower, Youngkin’s smile is his philosophy.

That congeniality is why, I think, it’s too soon to write him off. As DeSantis found out the hard way, even in an ever more nationalized and polarized political world, being able to connect is crucial.

Youngkin has proven he can do so, at least with his fellow elite. A Republican who attended a small dinner last summer in Nantucket with Youngkin and a group of donors told me the room took a liking to the Virginian, even as he regaled the masters of the universe with Richmond minutiae about how he reduced wait times at the DMV.

Another GOP governor said there was not much love for Youngkin in their ranks, in part because of how he handled his rookie success. Just months after his inauguration in 2022, Youngkin hit the campaign trail for other gubernatorial candidates, bringing them his signature fleece vest and even his own soundtrack. When he cut a robocall for Brian Kemp’s reelection that the Georgia governor hadn’t asked for, well, it was all a bit presumptuous (though Kemp, like other GOP candidates, invited the Virginian to campaign with him).

However, this same governor marveled at Youngkin’s raw talent as a political athlete, recalling how he grew from initially reading his remarks at a meeting of Republican governors to barnstorming the country in the 2022 midterms. “The donor class loves him,” this governor said of Youngkin.

The looming question, for Youngkin and any less-than-MAGA 2028 aspirant, is whether actual Republican voters want sunshine, smiles and a red-fleeced grin rather than an heir to the red-necktied scowl.

“He’s about the politics of addition not subtraction,” Henry Barbour, an RNC committeeman from Mississippi, said of Youngkin.

By 2028, Barbour said, “Youngkin could be a positive force for change” by which point the “extreme wings of both parties will have overplayed their hand.”

I’m more skeptical that Republicans will make a turn away from Trump (and Trumpism) if he finishes his second term, no matter the amount of donor wishcasting.

Should the former president lose this fall, though, there may be an opening for a different sort of Republican in 2028, one who doesn’t necessarily reject Trump but who has a notably different identity. Ring a bell?

First, though, Youngkin, whose job approval has remained above 50 percent despite his setbacks, will have to fend off the coming wave of Senate Republican recruiters.

The governor’s allies insist up and down he has no interest in running for the Senate in 2026, the year Youngkin’s term expires. But I’ve lost count of how many governors became easier prey for the NRSC and DSCC once they left office, lost their State Police detail and didn’t have a next gig.

Youngkin will be wooed and perhaps tempted, particularly if Biden wins and Virginia is decided by five or fewer points this year. Nobody knows this better than Warner, who’s the senator up in 2026. He lived through a similar near-death political experience in 2014 when he pulled out a closer-than-expected win in the second midterm of another Democratic president. Warner has been particularly attentive, Virginia Democrats point out to me, in maintaining a warm relationship with Youngkin.

Scott said it would be clearer now if Youngkin was interested in Warner’s seat.

“If he were running for the Senate in Virginia, he would not have been so extreme on guns and abortion,” said the House speaker.

Youngkin is the rare self-funding Republican businessman who didn’t have to be coached by advisers on cultural conservatism. He actually believes the stuff, at least on abortion and his personal faith. The most revealing Youngkin anecdote may be the one I heard from a Northern Virginia businessman who attended a small breakfast with the governor and was struck that the governor wanted to say grace with a group of largely Jewish executives.

Youngkin, though, is also a businessman to his core. The word that invariably comes up talking to people who know him is: optionality. It’s also the word that came to mind when I saw the picture from their meeting this week of Youngkin and Trump, the former president flashing an I-got-him smile and thumbs up.

It was a reminder that the more likely step forward for Youngkin would be to improve his standing with Trump and vie for a cabinet post should the former president win in November. O’Malley, the former Youngkin adviser, said the governor would make an ideal Treasury secretary because of his knowledge of markets and ability to drive a public message.

And there are some in Trump’s orbit who tell me Youngkin could have a role in the administration, even if vice president isn’t on the table.

What’s for certain to many of those who know Youngkin, though, is that there’s an end goal.

Scott told me that when he attended the Kennedy Center Honors late last year with Warner, the two encountered David Rubenstein, the former Carlyle Group CEO who worked with Youngkin at the private equity firm.

Rubenstein, Scott recalled, said Youngkin is focused on one objective: becoming president.

Ben Johansen contributed to this report.