So Mitch js going to enable the Trump fantasy that the election is in dispute so they can sabotage the transition, cripple the Biden administration and keep the crazies all riled up for Georgia. This undemocratic, unAmerican power politics is a Republican problem not a Donald Trump problem. The sickness runs through almost half of this country.
I just have to take this moment to point out that I called this scenario last August in this Salon column:
With all his braying about the election being “rigged,” it was pretty obvious back in 2016 that Trump believed he wasn’t going to win. There’s even some famous footage of him on election night giving a very tepid thumbs-up, looking stunned and even despondent.
The following was tweeted just as Trump took the lead in Electoral College votes:
Trump had said, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” and that didn’t really work out for him. So I’m quite sure he was looking forward to making up for it once he lost. He was no doubt planning to parlay all that attention into a rumored media empire and completing those big deals like the Trump Tower Moscow plan he’d had to drop. He’d had fun on the campaign trail but actually being president clearly wasn’t something he’d thought too much about.
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.
He’s not that hard to predict so it’s not as if I’m some kind of oracle. But so far it’s happening. And now this:
President Trump has already told advisers he’s thinking about running for president again in 2024, two sources familiar with the conversations tell Axios.
This is the clearest indication yet that Trump understands he has lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden — even as the president continues to falsely insist that he is the true winner, that there has been election fraud and that his team will fight to the end in the courts..
Aides advising Republicans who are likely to run in 2024 are dreading the prospect of a Trump run given the extraordinary sway he holds over millions of GOP voters.
Even four years after leaving office, he could remain formidable in a Republican primary.
That fact alone could freeze the ambitions, fundraising and staffing of individual candidates — and of the Republican National Committee as it seeks to regroup and move beyond Trump.
On the day he was inaugurated, in 2017, Trump filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to qualify as a 2020 candidate.