With the midterm elections now less than two months away, more and more attention is turning to what may happen in 2024 if failed, one-term former president Donald Trump decides to run for a second term in office after losing badly to President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.
Some political experts believe Trump will indeed seek the GOP nomination two years from now, if only because it helps him remain relevant and in the public eye, which he craves.
Democratic National Committee adviser Kurt Bardella notes that Trump needs constant attention:
“He’s an attention whore and everything always has to be about Donald. He has to make himself the centre of the universe so he goes out there and plays this little flirtatious ‘will he, won’t he?’ card and it’s just designed to continue to keep that conversation going.
“It’s also designed to try to keep his would-be competitors like Ron DeSantis or Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo at bay.”
But perhaps the biggest concern for the disgraced ex-president is the endless stream of legal issues that hang over his head and continue to expand, especially since he was caught hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. The Justice Department now believes that Trump has committed multiple felonies for keeping the documents in violation of federal law, including the Espionage Act.
So would a 2024 run protect Trump from a possible indictment and trial? No, but it’s almost as if he doesn’t realize that, according to Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia:
“He believes incorrectly that, if he’s a formal candidate, that will somehow protect him from legal charges. It will not. We’ve had quite a number of candidates in American history who got into legal troubles so I don’t know why he thinks that. Somebody probably said something to him once and he never let it go.
Nobody knows. He is very likely to run again but I can see scenarios in which he wouldn’t. He said himself, let’s see how my health is. He hasn’t had the best diet in the world and doesn’t look to me to be in particularly good shape.”
What will Trump do? For now, reports are that he has told the Republican National Committee he won’t announce a 2024 run until after the upcoming midterms. Ironically, it’s expected the DOJ will also make a formal announcement after the election whether or not it will charge the former president with crimes related to his document scandal.
