By the time the 2020 election kicks into highest gear, Trump will have been president for more than three years, barring his impeachment, his resignation or his spontaneous combustion (with him, you never know). We’ll have evidence aplenty to demonstrate that he’s ineffective and incompetent, an approach more likely to have traction than telling voters that he’s outrageous. They already know that.

We just have to wean ourselves from his Twitter expectorations, which are such easy, entertaining fuel for talking — or, rather, exploding — heads. I’ve certainly been powered by that fuel, in print and on television, myself.

“You know what would be great?” said Amanda Carpenter, who worked as a communications adviser and speechwriter for Ted Cruz and wrote the 2018 book “Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us.” “Instead of covering Trump’s tweets on a live, breaking basis, just cover them in the last five minutes of a news show. They’re presidential statements, but we can balance them.”

We can also allow his challengers to talk about themselves as much as they do about him. In 2016, Carpenter said, that didn’t happen. “It was deeply unfair,” she told me. “When the whole news cycle was microphones shoved in Republican candidates’ faces and the question was always, ‘What’s your reaction to what Trump just said?,’ there’s no way to drive your own message.”

And when journalists gawp at each of Trump’s tirades, taunts and self-congratulatory hallucinations, these heresies blur together and he evades accountability for the ones that should stick. I asked Rather what he was most struck by in the 2016 campaign, and he instantly mentioned Trump’s horrific implication, in public remarks that August, that gun enthusiasts could rid themselves of a Clinton presidency by assassinating her.

I’d almost forgotten it. So many lesser shocks so quickly overwrote it. Rather wasn’t surprised. “It got to the point where it was one outrage after another, and we just moved on each time,” he said. Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments. We should pause there awhile. We can’t privilege the incremental over what should be the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook.

So does anything, really, that tugs us from issues of policy and governance into the realms of theater and sport. That puts a greater premium than ever on avoid ing what Joel Benenson called “the horse-race obsession” with who’s ahead, who’s behind, who seems to be breaking into a gallop, who’s showing signs of a limp.