My biggest fear is that despite everything Trump has done-- inciting the Capitol Riots is foremost on my mind, given that I was just re-reading the 1/6 thread-- he could still run and win in 2024.
Someone quell my fears and tell me that’s not bloody likely.
If most of the opposition consists of “Don’t worry-it just can’t happen”, then it is very likely that it could happen.
I wonder where you ground your optimistic assumption that the Republican Party will not be able to come up with someone worse, and more qualified and competent to boot.
74million votes, gaining 20% over 2016.
You better believe it’s possible.
Of course he could.
It could happen.
Better hope for a booming economy and generally improved lives as the best way to keep the Democrats in charge for another term. 2016 & 2020 show Trump could win. They’re still selling Trump signs at the local Army/Navy store.
To add to my admittedly curt answer:
If Trump runs for President in 2024, he is all but certain to be the Republican nominee. No Republican with any future in the party will dare oppose him, and he would steamroll over a Larry Hogan or other “never Trump” candidate. So that alone puts him in an excellent position.
The other factor here is that Republicans are in a strong position to win back one or both chambers of Congress in 2022. Should they do so, any remaining Biden legislative initiatives are DOA. Republicans will use their chairmanships and investigatory powers to turn every perceived misstep or impropriety by the Administration into a media circus (e.g. Benghazi). If they take the Senate, they will similarly turn every executive or judicial branch nomination into a high-profile showdown. And they will hope (not without reason) that Biden will take the blame for “getting nothing done” and not “being bipartisan.”
Yes he could, if he’s not criminally prosecuted and convicted between now and then. But I don’t think he wants the job. He wants authority, but not the responsibility that goes with authority. He certainly shuns responsibility, but lots of American voters think that’s cool.
Maybe, but I think it’s unlikely. He was able to win in 2016 because of a perfect storm of factors, at least one of which can’t happen again (he had never held office before and was therefore something of a blank slate on which people could project what they wanted to see), and several more of which are extremely unlikely to happen again (Hillary Clinton is highly unlikely to be the Democratic nominee, both Democrats and other Republicans running in the primaries won’t make the specific strategic mistakes they made in 2016 although it’s possible that they might make other ones, etc.)
He would never win the popular vote. But say your nation was saddled with an undemocratic relic of white supremacy known as the Electoral College…
A lot of people don’t realize that Biden’s margin of victory was even narrower than Trumps in 2016. A tiny swing of 43K votes (Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin) could have given us a 269-269 tie, and we all now how that would have played out.
The Republicans view the last election as a correctable aberration, and by “correctable” I do not mean “The system will correct itself naturally”. By hook and by crook they will actively “correct” the problems of the wrong people voting and the ununified front of Republican politicians and not having enough control over the voting process itself. Unless the Democrats do some decisive hard and heavy stomping of their own the elections they plan to participate in in the future will already have been lost.
Welp. It’s five o’clock somewhere …
The numbers may have changed since I first factored them, but I came up with 21463 for an electoral tie and 32510 for an electoral win.
It doesn’t seem like it but Trump came that close to getting reelected.
But I steadfastly maintain that he never wanted the job in the first place. He never expected to win those primaries. He wanted to run off his mouth, give a speech during the convention, and then heckle the candidate who lost against Hillary or criticize their policies if they won.
And he certainly didn’t expect nor want to win the general.
If he runs again it will be just like last time. A massive ego trip for a job he doesn’t want to do.
He might be able to waddle, I doubt he’ll be able to run…
In all seriousness though- how old will he be by then? I wonder if he’d be able to pull off looking and sounding heathy enough to make a convincing go of it, aside from anything else.
The answer is yes. See the numbers quoted above.
Especially if once again all the mediasphere and punditocracy becomes 24/7 focused on “OMG LOOK AT WHAT TRUMP SAID TODAY!!!” and give him more coverage than every other candidate combined. Which they will be less able to avoid this time around, “a former president running, he’s news!” and all that.
Just under one year older than Biden is today.
I think it will be harder for him to win, if for no other reason than he won’t have Twitter.
He could certainly run. He certainly won’t win.
The Democrats should be rooting hard, hard, hard for him to run. Guaranteed landslide reelection for Biden.
If he does, I think we should be certain that the election is fixed. He couldn’t handle losing last time. He won’t risk that again – he’d only do it if he’s really guaranteed to “win” by having loyal and unscrupulous people in all of the necessary positions.
That’s what I thought for about three years until the 2020 campaign got rolling in earnest.
Then I felt really dumb and stupidly optimistic.
A hypothetical 2024 run is different from Trump’s actual 2020 one, though, because he wouldn’t be running as an incumbent, and he would have to win the primary first. It’s more of an uphill climb than the election that he just lost. If he couldn’t win that one, why would he be likely to win the next one?