This article by Garrett Graff in Politico assumes Trump won’t be seeking revenge by immediately running for president in 2024, but takes a look at how different he will be than other former presidents. I actually think it will be worse than what he says, but it’s pretty bad.
If Trump loses and actually leaves office, I personally believe he’ll fashion himself as the legitimate president in exile and remain as an adversary in the public eye. I don’t know if he’ll ultimately run in 2024, but you can believe he will keep up the pretense as long as he can to stay in the spotlight and make as much money as possible.
From profiting off his lifetime Secret Service protection to trolling the Biden administration by cozying up to dictators around the world, Trump’s stint as ex-president could be as disruptive and norm-busting as the last four years have been.
Being an ex-president can be a cushy and quiet life for the most part. Jimmy Carter builds homes; George W. Bush paints. After leaving the White House, Barack Obama went kite-surfing with Richard Branson on his private island in the British Virgin Islands.
None of that, though, seems likely to be in the cards for Donald Trump if he loses reelection Tuesday and in just 80-odd days leaves the White House.
A restless figure with few interests outside his own business and political career, no hobbies besides playing golf at his own properties and few traditional friends, Trump thrives on public attention and disruption; this, after all, is a man who couldn’t even spend an entire weekend cooped up inside a hospital while ill with Covid-19 earlier this month and had to take a joyride around Walter Reed Medical Center to wave to supporters.
So if he loses the White House, what new phase would begin on January 21?
In interviews, historians, government legal experts, national security leaders and people close to the administration have a prediction that will disquiet his critics: The Trump Era is unlikely to end when the Trump presidency ends. They envision a post-presidency as disruptive and norm-busting as his presidency has been—one that could make his successor’s job much harder.They outline a picture of a man who might formally leave office only to establish himself as the president-for-life amid his own bubble of admirers—controlling Republican politics and sowing chaos in the U.S. and around the world long after he’s officially left office.
“Can he continue to make people not trust our institutions? Can he throw monkey wrenches into delicate negotiations? Absolutely,” one former Trump administration official says. “He can be a tool. He’ll be somewhere between dangerous and devastating on that extent.”
A president unwilling to respect boundaries in office is almost certain to cross them out of office. Experts envision some likely scenarios—a much-rumored TV show and plans to use his properties to profit off his lifetime Secret Service protection, perhaps even continuing to troll the Biden administration from his hotel down Pennsylvania Avenue—and some troubling if less certain ones, like literally selling U.S. secrets or influence to foreign governments.
Trump has already mused that maybe he’ll leave the country if he loses, but few expect him to willingly depart the American public stage. He would leave the White House with one of the largest social media platforms in the world—including 87 million Twitter followers—and a large campaign email list with a demonstrated small-dollar fundraising capability that could be used to aid other MAGA-friendly politicians—or, just as likely, to sell Trump’s own wares. And he’s presumably going to need every dollar he can squeeze from his businesses and the office he will have just left. As the New York Times has been documenting, Trump personally and the Trump Organization more broadly has more than $1 billion in debt coming due in the years ahead. If he leaves office, he’ll have to be busy raising the cash to pay it off.
Yes, Trump will probably grab the low-hanging fruit favored by ex-presidents past: profiting off the White House with a memoir—though many in the publishing industry don’t think he’ll get that much money for it—and living off a spigot of government money as he settles into the post-presidency. But those presidential traditions will provide just a fraction of the hundreds of millions Trump needs, and are unlikely to satisfy his entertainer’s ego.
“He’s still the leader of a movement,” says Nancy Gibbs, a journalist and historian who co-wrote The Presidents Club about the lives of former presidents. “I’m hard pressed to recall a past president who left office with a movement intact that wasn’t transferred to someone else. I don’t see him giving it up.”
Which means, from even those first minutes, Trump’s post-presidency would almost certainly be unlike anything America—or the world—has ever experienced. Assuming he’s able to settle any legal challenges arising from the presidency and doesn’t spend the rest of his days in tax court in New York state, Trump as a 74-year-old man has a normal life expectancy of around 11 years, and most former presidents actually far outlive the average American, so he might have a couple decades to disrupt the world’s most exclusive club of ex-presidents.
“It’s a safe bet that many of the rules and patterns of past presidents will not apply to him,” says Gibbs. “I long ago stopped putting limits on what he might do or sell. There are no boundaries.”
A career salesman will find himself with more connections around the world than he’s ever had before—and also with more grievances against people he feels mistreated him and forced him from office prematurely. “I put two years as the over-under on groundbreaking for Trump Tower Moscow,” says one former national security official. “It’ll be a huge F.U. to all the Russia coup plotters.”
Graff goes on to discuss all the ways in which he will continue to bilk the taxpayers, his memoir, a possible media empire and presidential library, but I think this is the most alarming:
Once he leaves office, there’s nothing to stop him from entering into lucrative and questionable business deals the world over—and he’d likely find a certain type of country or company all too eager to engage with him. “His mischief is much more international than national as an ex,” says a former senior Trump administration official. “There’s nothing [about leaving office] that diminishes his utility as an instrument of a foreign power.”
Trump’s past business practices already illustrate the possibilities: A hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan, which the New Yorker labeled “a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard”; recently revealed questionable business deals in China; and of course the Trump Tower Moscow project that he evidently pursued even as he ran for president. The possibilities for such deals post-presidency will expand exponentially and likely prove particularly necessary to secure the requisite cash flow to hold off the estimated $1 billion-plus in debt owed by his entire business empire.
In the years before the White House, the Trump Organization had largely become a branding entity—licensing the Trump name to products and projects rather than owning them outright or developing them himself. That may continue to be a smart play post-presidency, providing steady cash without a lot of the headaches of running enterprises.
Even more lucrative than the Trump brand, though, would be selling Trump himself. Look for Trump to be wooed not by the nation’s top adversaries or allies, but instead by the secondary and tertiary global powers who want the imprimatur of U.S. recognition and respect and are willing to roll out the red carpet for state-visitlike celebrations, perhaps all under the guises of fancy ribbon-cuttings of new Trump-branded projects.
Intelligence professionals can envision, for instance, Trump standing on the world stage alongside his favorite global strongmen—say Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—bragging about his new joint development deals and the world leaders willing to host him even as they reject entreaties from President Biden. Think “Trump Tower Damascus will be a new start for my peace-loving friend Bashar al-Assad.” Or even imagine Trump, Rodman-style, turning up courtside at North Korean basketball games with his buddy Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang, just as Joe Biden turns up the pressure on the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear program.
Current presidents often deploy former presidents as roving global diplomats par excellence, ambassadors without portfolio but owed the highest level of respect. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, for example, have both been sent to North Korea to work out delicate negotiations. But it’s unlikely that a President Biden would ever turn to Trump for help on touchy geopolitical problems. And it’s unlikely Trump would give it. Instead, experts imagine Trump as free chaos agent—more or less what he’s been inside the White House, but with even less staffing, process or official restraints.
“Undermining our will, effectiveness and attempts to reassert our values and effectiveness? He’d be 100 percent willing to mess with that 100 percent for personal gain and continued notoriety,” says a former Trump administration official. “Imagine you don’t have Jimmy Carter out there doing your bidding, you have Donald Trump sitting down with these guys and offering them a stage to sell themselves.”
Trump, who has brokered what he sees as a historic opening between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries largely by excluding Palestinians from the process, might be particularly inclined to undermine any attempts by future presidential administrations to restore their voice or rebalance power in the Middle East. Similarly, if a President Biden moves aggressively against any of the regimes Trump befriended as president, Trump wouldn’t necessarily stand on the sidelines.
“He could become the best friend, underminer, impediment to reestablishing any kind of normalized relationships the United States seeks in the future. He’s able to be there offering a different perspective. You’ve now created in him a negative-pressure relief valve,” says the former Trump administration official.
As another expert told me, “When it was his job to put the country’s interests first, he didn’t put the country’s interests first. Why would we expect anything different after?”
There is no precedent for a former president’s conducting his own freelance foreign policy—and certainly not one that would go against the expressed policy of his successor. (Perhaps the closest analogue is the complex plot by former vice president—and Alexander Hamilton killer—Aaron Burr to form a breakaway republic in the then-southwestern United States with perhaps himself as emperor.) While the U.S. does have laws against citizens attempting to carry out their own foreign policy—it was concerns about that so-called Logan Act that helped launch the investigation of incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn as he spoke to the Russian ambassador about Obama administration sanctions—the law has never been used in American history. As president, Trump has said he thought that former Secretary of State John Kerry violated the Logan Act in his one-man diplomacy to preserve the Iran deal as it was under attack from the Trump White House. The bar to deploy the Logan Act against a former government leader would be presumably high and prove as much a thorny political question as a criminal one. “We all shit all over the Logan Act [as useless], but at what point does that cross over into a legal issue? If he’s going to be trying to obstruct the foreign policy of the United States, what does that mean?” wonders the intelligence professional. “Talk about a complex investigation and case to bring.”
Most helpful to America’s adversaries overseas, though, would be that Trump’s ongoing tweeting and public appearances would simply serve as a constant reminder of America’s political instability. One of the reasons that Russia originally interfered in the 2016 election was simply to undermine the legitimacy of western democracies, and Trump’s ongoing tradition-shattering continues to underscore that message and lead other countries to doubt the moral superiority of American democracy.
Keep in mind that he has had access to all of America’s secrets and has shown as president that he is willing to run his mouth for his own self-aggrandizement. Imagine what he’d do for money and influence overseas after he’s out?
What can be done about this? I honestly don’t know.