Skip to main content

Trump 2024: Will the former U.S. president run again?

Share

This time last year, a newly defeated Donald Trump was in full-on assault mode.

Take for instance Dec. 20, 2020, when the former U.S. president sent 28 tweets, many times claiming voting fraud, attacking the media and those in his party he felt didn’t stand up for him, and retweeting anyone spouting conspiracy theories of a rigged election.

Of course, at that point, the deadly and potentially legacy-defining Jan. 6 insurrection at Capitol Hill (Trump’s role is still being investigated by a congressional committee) was just a couple of weeks away. And a few days after that, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms would permanently suspend the former president, citing fears he would incite further violence.

So without his megaphone that captured immediate headlines, in the early months of 2021 Trump receded to the background. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump showed in April that Google search interest and the frequency of Trump's appearances on cable TV had both returned to roughly the low levels they were before he ran for office.

But while his dominance of the mainstream news cycle has faded, and a myriad of legal woes stare him down, he still tops early polls of Republican voters for 2024 presidential candidates.

And the 45th president has followed through on his promise to assemble his own media empire, though how it will perform remains to be seen.

‘WE'RE GOING TO TAKE AMERICA BACK'

In many ways, Trump is already campaigning. At a rally in Iowa in October, the former president told supporters: "We're going to take America back." He is endorsing federal and state candidates and sends out fundraising appeals almost daily for his political action committee, "Save America," which had amassed US$90 million when it last made a disclosure to the Federal Election Commission in June.

Trump’s body language is designed to convince people he’s running, and his power is such that the GOP nomination is his for the asking,” wrote Fox News columnist Howard Kurtz on Nov. 24.

Trump told Fox News on Nov. 8 that he would "probably" wait until after the 2022 midterm to announce whether he will run again in 2024.

"I am certainly thinking about it and we’ll see," Trump said. "I think a lot of people will be very happy, frankly, with the decision, and [I] probably will announce that after the midterms."

His Thanksgiving statement also teased a possible bid, drawing on his 2016 campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.”

"A very interesting time in our Country [sic], but do not worry, we will be great again—and we will all do it together," he wrote.

A long list of Republicans could potentially take a shot at a presidential run, including names like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Ron DeSantis, but it was thought unlikely any of them would take on Trump.

“If Donald Trump decides to run in 2024 again, he’s going to be the Republican nominee,” said Rubio, the senator from Florida, in April.

But there are growing signs lately in polls and in rhetoric, that some opponents are lining up, including DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. The latter is promoting a new book that dismisses Trump’s ongoing false claim that he won in 2020.

And Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the UN under Trump, has not ruled out a White House run in 2024 either. But she is treading carefully when it comes to taking on Trump directly, saying the Republican party needs him.

Whatever Trump ultimately decides, he will keep dangling a third run at the presidency, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton was quoted as saying in a Nov. 21 story in The Atlantic.

“Imagine what would happen if he said, ‘After careful consideration, I won’t be a candidate in 2024.’ You can hear the spotlight switches turning off. He’ll talk about it (running for president again) right up until the point when he doesn’t.”

Richard Albert, director of constitutional studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Allan Rock, president emeritus and a professor of law at the University of Ottawa, argued in an op-ed in The Globe and Mail published on Nov. 26 that Canada needs to prepare for another Trump presidency.

“Appalling, but true: All signs point to former U.S. president Donald Trump running again for the White House in 2024. And the conditions are ripe for another victory,” they wrote, citing Trump’s massive campaign-style rallies, polls in some states that show Trump’s approval ratings are higher now than while he was in office, and former senior aide Jason Miller’s contention that the odds of a Trump bid are “somewhere between 99 and 100 per cent.”

“Progressive and moderate Democrats are locked in a destructive battle for the soul of the party, while the Republican Party is united behind Mr. Trump: 78 per cent of the GOP want him to run again, and 66 per cent continue to believe that Mr. Biden was illegitimately elected.”

Trump and his team spent the first few months of Joe Biden’s presidency challenging the results of the election in six states, losing more than 60 cases alleging voting fraud, including at the Supreme Court.

LEGAL TROUBLES

Serious legal troubles could be the biggest threat to Trump’s plans. Investigations continue into his financial dealings in New York and there is a criminal probe underway in Georgia into Trump’s alleged attempts to interfere in the state’s 2020 election results.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a serious blow to the former president when it ruled in February that New York prosecutors would get access to his tax records for the last eight years.

Investigators are also said to be looking into wildly different valuations of buildings in New York and California owned by the Trump Organization. Media reports in November said the buildings were listed in the five years leading up to Trump’s election win in 2016 for up to 30 times more in value when the Trump Organization was seeking investors than what they were appraised for tax officials.

That news came after the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg and two Trump companies were indicted in June for income tax fraud. Trump himself was not accused of wrongdoing and Weisselberg and the two companies have pleaded not guilty.

In October, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform that is investigating allegations of conflict of interest during Trump’s time in the Oval Office said new documents raised “troubling” questions about what was considered the “crown jewel” of his hotel empire, Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The hotel, which sold for US$375 million to a group expected to remove the Trump name, is alleged to have received more than $3.7 million in payments from foreign governments during his presidency.

Some Trump critics say he continues to remain a contender for 2024 primarily so that he can frame any pursuit of criminal charges against him as a politically motivated attempt to keep him off the ballot.

That idea could hold sway, says Christopher Sands, the director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

“I could see a scenario where he is convicted and it doesn’t make a difference. He will push the narrative that it’s all made up and there is a conspiracy against him.”  

So, will he or won’t he run again?

Sands believes Trump will wait until the last minute to announce a decision about making a bid in 2024 because it suits him. His supporters continue to donate, Republican politicians seek his support, or at least tiptoe around him, and he remains in the public eye. 

Sands points to the upset win of Glenn Youngkin in the governor’s race in Virginia in early November as a sign of how moderate Republicans could handle the shadow of Trump. Youngkin unseated an incumbent in a Democratic stronghold in the last four presidential elections. He did that by courting both the former commander-in-chief’s rabid base of support, while also appealing to Republicans who rejected the party under Trump.

“He didn’t talk about Trump but he didn’t attack him either. I think we’ll see this as a bit of a blueprint, including for Kristi Noem, who is running again for governor in South Dakota,” said Sands in a phone interview from Maryland with CTVNews.ca.

Midterms in 2022 will be key, says Sands, and the spectre of Trump will loom large. Blue-collar America still feels heard by Trump and ignored by Washington’s elite.

“And Republicans will be hoping to stoke the discontent of voters, especially suburban white women who abandoned the Republicans because of Trump.”

Trump is heartily endorsing challengers in next year’s midterms who are running against perceived enemies, including Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial this year, and Republican House Representative Liz Cheney, who also voted to impeach and serves on the committee investigating the Capitol insurrection.

If his backing can tip the scales for his choices, that could convince him to take another run.

That once seemed a long shot.

Columnist Paul Waldman at the Washington Post declared in March that Trump was “fading away, getting smaller and smaller, quieter and quieter.” Trumpism is a dead end, he said.

Waldman believed Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack and its aftermath, his mishandling of the pandemic, plus his expulsion from Twitter, would be his demise and cement a legacy of failure.

But by October Waldman had entirely changed his mind: “Like a horror movie villain, Donald Trump threatens to rise again after we thought he was slain,” he wrote.

“So brace yourself: While until now it seemed Trump wanted to keep the idea of a 2024 run alive just for attention, the chances that he’ll go through with it are growing fast. We should be very afraid.”

Trump backers are anything but frightened by that prospect.

In an Nov. 8 post on American Greatness, a platform that bills itself as “the leading voice of the next generation of American conservatism,” columnist Conrad Black wrote, “the full horror of Bidenization” will lead to “a resurrection of American national self-confidence.”

The loss of the governor’s seat in Virginia in early November, a traditional Democrat stronghold, came because incumbent Terry McAuliffe’s “entire campaign was Trump-hate—the inevitable mantra of the Democratic Party these past five years.”

For the Canadian-born Black, the vote to turf McAuliffe is a referendum on the Biden administration, which he says is failing on the economy, immigration, pandemic management, national defence, energy policy and foreign relations. 

“As of now, the Republicans appear to be unbeatable in 2022 and 2024 and Trump appears to be unbeatable among the Republicans.”

And throughout 2021, the former president has been busy assembling the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which will be headed by Devin Nunes, who gave up his seat in Congress on Dec. 6 to take on the role. The company launched the TRUTH Social platform in October, promising a “nationwide rollout” in early 2022.

“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced,” Trump said in a statement.

The social site is the first of three stages in the company’s plans, which also includes a subscription video-on-demand service that will feature entertainment, news and podcasts, and eventually a cloud service.

The venture forecasts 81 million viewers and up to a US$1.7 billion valuation in its regulatory filings, but was immediately mired in troubles. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority are probing a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp. to take the company public.

But while ambitions are lofty for TMTG, a blog on donaldjtrump.com, which promised content “straight from the desk of Donald J. Trump,” was shut down in June, less than a month after going live. A source told The New York Times that Trump pulled the plug because the site “was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant.”

And that’s something Trump just can’t abide, says Sands, who thinks it’s unlikely the 75-year-old will ultimately run again given his age and the spectre of losing again.

But never say never.

“Old guys, even when they are well past their last hurrah, will keep coming back. It’s like Clint Eastwood, who will never go away, and keeps making one more movie. Biden has to say he’s running in 2024, otherwise he’s a lame duck. Trump is dangling that out there, too. He loves to be the guy everyone is talking about,” Sands said.

“But the reality is he has more to gain as a kingmaker than in running for king.”

CTVNews.ca Top Stories

Local Spotlight

Record-setting pop tab collection for Ontario boy

It started small with a little pop tab collection to simply raise some money for charity and help someone — but it didn’t take long for word to get out that 10-year-old Jace Weber from Mildmay, Ont. was quickly building up a large supply of aluminum pop tabs.