You don’t need a well-seasoned political prognosticator to predict that former president Donald Trump will soon be announcing his 2024 presidential run. In fact, that news may come even before the end of summer. To put this prediction into the even more emphatic negative, he simply cannot not run!
For more than two and a half years, Trump has been holding large political rallies during which he spends an inordinate amount of time lamenting how the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, without ever providing a shred of evidence.
Q2 2022 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
No one knows for sure if even he actually believes his lie, but tens of millions of his ardent followers certainly appear to. The only way to attain vindication and revenge is for Trump to run again in 2024.
Trump's Indictment
The greatest impetus for an early announcement is the upcoming trial in Fulton County, Georgia. A grand jury will soon be considering indictments for Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, and several other of his partners-in-crime. But before the Grand Jury can decide whether or not to indict Trump, he may proactively announce his candidacy, and then conveniently claim that his indictment was a political decision.
Another obvious motivation for an early announcement would be to freeze the field of potential Republican presidential rivals. Right now, the strongest is obviously Ron DeSantis, Florida’s very popular governor, who is up for reelection this November. By announcing his candidacy before November, Trump will likely take some of the wind out of DeSantis’s sails.
Already politically bloodied by the January 6 Select Committee’s revelations, Trump – and the political damage soon to be done by the Georgia prosecution – he needs to declare his 2024 candidacy while he is still near the peak of his political standing.
Perhaps Trump’s ultimate incentive to run again would be his potential “Get out of jail free card,” which ensures that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted for any crimes committed before he took office. After all, if you think Attorney General Merick Garland is too reticent about bringing criminal charges against Trump, try to imagine what a future Trump-appointed Attorney General would do.
If Trump were found guilty of a serious crime – whether in Georgia or elsewhere – he will try to remain free on appeal until the 2024 presidential election. And if he lands safely back in the White House, he will remain a free man for the next four years.
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