To accuse former President Donald Trump of being petulant is like accusing a cow of being bovine or a butterfly of being flighty. His toddlerlike self-absorption, for reasons that continue to elude me, does not bother his working-class base. But even his supporters generally recognize that a certain boastful sulkiness is part of his brand.

Even so, the tetchy way in which he has reacted to the replacement of President Joe Biden by Vice President Kamala Harris is spectacularly self-defeating.

In his rambling interview with Elon Musk, Trump peevishly referred to the removal of Biden as “a coup,” echoing his vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who has repeatedly used the same phrase.

But hang on. A “coup” is the subversion of a constitutional order, generally violent, resulting in the removal of a legitimate government. You know, like storming the Capitol to overturn an election result.

In this case, there has been no attempt to overthrow the regime. Biden is still in the White House, whether the old boy is aware of it or not. All that has happened is that one of the two main parties has chosen, within the rules, to nominate someone more electable.

And you know what? It is open to the other party to do the same thing, to replace its own pair of duds with more viable candidates.

Of all the lies Republicans tell themselves to justify their abasement before Trump, the most implausible is that he is an election winner. In fact, in both 2016 and 2020, he was outpolled by most Republican senatorial and gubernatorial candidates. It is true that, in 2016, he nonetheless won the states he needed, but that was against a spectacularly hopeless Democrat — and even then, he lost the popular vote.

Sure, Trump might turn out some people who would not vote for other Republicans. But we are looking here at the net impact, the ratio of soccer moms lost to bearded mountain men gained. When you compare Trump’s figures to those of downballot Republicans, there is no doubt he is a drag on the ticket.

The reason the betting markets are now predicting a Harris win is they can see what Trump supporters won’t, namely that, while his support has a high floor, it also has a low ceiling.

Against an obviously unelectable candidate like Hillary Clinton, or a visibly senile candidate like Biden, Trump wins. Against a normal Democrat, he loses.

Now, you might argue that Harris is far from being a normal Democrat, that her fringe views and inability to string a sentence together put her in the unelectable category. I wrote here last month about her far-left economic opinions.

Her radical stances on identity politics would take up another entire column. This is the politician who backed gender surgery for minors, who refers to Hispanic people by the hideous term “Latinx,” and who urged her supporters to post bail for Black Lives Matter rioters.

But that is precisely the point. Against any other Republican candidate, Harris would be toast. On some level, almost all Republican strategists know it. But they quail before their primary voters, refuse to defend their principles, and, in the last analysis, turn on those who, such as Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney, stand by the convictions that all Republicans used to profess. They are past the point where they can realistically complain about, let alone resist, the MAGA takeover of their party.

Yet the odd thing is that, on policy, Trump is much closer to most people than Harris is. If he were a bit more astute, he would allow that fact to emerge, effectively submitting her to the party primary that she never had. Instead, he and Vance are campaigning in the only way they know, through babyish insults. She’s a DEI hire! She’s not properly black! She’s a mad cat lady! She laughs too much! Unsurprisingly, these attack lines motivate her base much more than their own.

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Harris’s vice presidential nominee, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), is also vulnerable on policy. Like most public schoolteachers, he combines lazy wokery with quasi-socialist economics. But incredibly, Trump and Vance prefer to go after him over his military record. Yes, that’s Trump, who, having dodged the Vietnam draft, thought it appropriate to mock John McCain’s service record.

In a normal world, Harris-Walz would be the extreme choice. Except for one thing. If they lost, they would accept the result and concede. The same is not true of Trump and Vance. That fact alone should disqualify them from serious consideration. That they are unchallenged and unchallengeable says nothing good about their party.