In his press conference on Thanksgiving, Trump was asked if he plans to attend the inauguration and he said he knew what he was going to do but didn’t want to talk about it right now. Now we know why. As Tom Sullivan writes below, he wants to counter-program the inauguration with a rally. Seriously. He is that petty.
The Daily Beast article he cites also says this:
In the twilight of his presidency, Donald Trump is discussing different ways to disrupt the impending Joe Biden era, chief among them by announcing another run against him.
According to three people familiar with the conversations, the president, who refuses to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election as he clearly did, has not just talked to close advisers and confidants about a potential 2024 run to reclaim the White House but about the specifics of a campaign launch…The president and some of his closest associates have already started surveying prominent donors to get a sense of who would be with him, or perhaps against him, if he chose to run in the 2024 election. Some top Trump allies have told The Daily Beast that they are doing what they can to stay in the president’s good graces, calculating that doing so will help ensure a seat at the table and a future in the party—in the event he runs again...
On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that during an Oval Office meeting earlier this month between Trump, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the president said he planned on running in 2024, if the 2020 election results were not nullified by Trump’s attorneys.
“If you do that—and I think I speak for everybody in the room—we’re with you 100 percent,” O’Brien told the president, according to the Bloomberg report…Still, various Trump diehards aren’t giving up on the flailing fight—but are keeping their minds open about a 2024 run and how much they’d relish seeing a revival tour.
Here is what I wrote several months ago about this:
This time I think Trump really does want to win, if only to prove that he has a legitimate claim to the White House. (Protecting himself from legal trouble for another four years would be nice too.) But even someone as thick as he is can read the polls, and I would guess that he’s plotting to turn defeat to his advantage if the worst happens.
It would seem that his plan is to sow chaos if possible, challenge the result where he can, and claim that Joe Biden’s victory is illegitimate, regardless of the margin of victory. He can then set himself up as the president in exile, free to make money from speaking fees and books while trying to rehabilitate his tattered “brand.” Perhaps that rumored media empire will finally come to fruition. Most importantly, he’d be able to keep his cult alive with the tantalizing promise of a rematch in 2024.
I have no idea if Trump would actually want to do that — he might want to pass the torch to Don Jr. or Ivanka, and there’s no guarantee Republican voters would play along all over again. But in many ways, losing will offer him the opportunity to do what he loves to do most, and make money while doing it: tweet, shoot the breeze with media sycophants, play golf and bask in the adulation of his adoring fans. Who knows, he might even hold rallies. He could have all that without all the unpleasantness of trying to do a job he has never been able to figure out how to do.
It’s depressing to think that Donald Trump won’t simply fade into obscurity if he’s defeated this fall, I know. But I think he’s going to be like that obnoxious party guest who’s always the last to leave, whether we like it or not. The silver lining is that if he does decide to stay in the game, he’ll be like a lead weight dragging down the Republican Party for another four years. You know he’s going to make their lives even more hellish than the Democrats — and after their cowardly enabling of his monumental failures and criminal misdeeds, it’s exactly what they deserve.
It’s that last that makes me hope he does launch another run. It will divide the Republicans who, as much as they may have taken advantage of his incompetence and ignorance, do not want him to dominate politics for another four to eight years. They have other people with big ambitions and even as they cynically took advantage of his chaos, they know a cult of personality has a shelf life.