I have no idea if Trump will run in 2024. I suspect he probably will, but I’m not sure. Remember that he is VERY old, and he doesn’t want to break his hold on the GOP by potentially losing again. So it’s not inconceivable that he might be content to play ‘king maker’ rather than be the king. Still, I think the guy is a narcissist and the political rallies and love he got from his base was like the purest and most uncut heroin to him. If I had to guess, I’m guessing he runs in 2024.
If he runs, I have ZERO doubt that he wins the nomination of the GOP. He just was too large a stranglehold on a substantial part of that party. it’s not that he controls the whole thing. I’m not even sure he controls a majority. There’s alot of Republicans who held their nose voting for him in 2016 and 2020.
The problem is that you would need pretty much the ENTIRE GOP that isn’t Trump’s rabid base to coalesce around ONE challenger. And that’s not usually how primaries work. They’ll split the anti-Trump vote.
The problem for Trump is that I don’t think there’s any way whatsoever he can win the general election. I think the Democrats could nominate LITERALLY ANYONE and they’d beat Trump. Warren, Sanders, AOC…they could pick the looniest and most radical person they can find, and they would beat Trump in a landslide.
And I don’t think Trump’s base ‘gets it’. They really believe there is this large silent pro=Trump consensus in America. They really believe the ‘steal’. I know a couple of these people. They are not dummies. Don’t think this is an intelligence thing. It’s cognitive dissonance. Confirmation bias. They simply can’t believe any information that runs contrary to Trump’s narrative because everything that contradicts him must be some ‘attack’. The ones I know are even CRITICAL of Trump. And they still fall for it.
In a general election, I think Democrats, independents, and most moderate Republicans will vote against Trump. There’s no one the Democrats can pick that they’ll hate more, unlike in 2016 where Trump won mostly because alot of people hated Hillary more than Trump.