Americans just endured a long, nasty, and exhausting midterm-election cycle.
Word is, tomorrow former president Donald Trump will announce his bid for the presidency in 2024 — one year, eleven months, and 21 days before the presidential election, and probably about one year and one month before the first caucus or primary. Trump declared on Truth Social today that “hopefully, tomorrow will turn out to be one of the most important days in the history of our Country!”
From where I sit, the timing for a Trump presidential announcement is terrible. Republicans are deeply disappointed, angry, and frustrated about the midterm elections, and it’s not just the usual Never-Trumpers who think Trump and his endorsed candidates hurt the GOP this year. And that’s after Trump’s election-conspiracy theories cost Republicans the Georgia runoffs and control of the Senate in 2021, and after losing the presidency in 2020, and after costing the GOP a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018. We still await a runoff in Georgia, and we don’t have a winner in a bunch of U.S. House races.
Your mileage may vary, but I get the sense that Trump is declaring out of impatience, boredom with non-presidential life, and a furious envy of the recent praise of Ron DeSantis’s big win. And maybe Trump thinks that if he announces, all the prosecutors investigating him and pursuing a case against him have to put everything on hold, lest their prosecutions appear too political. There’s absolutely no reason that Trump has to announce early. He doesn’t need to build up his name recognition. He doesn’t need a lot of preparation time, or to build up his fundraising network. He is the ultimate known quantity, and everybody in America already knows how they feel about him. A presidential campaign would almost be superfluous. Trump could announce about a month or two before the first caucus or primary and it would likely turn out the same.
It is possible that the Trump announcement kicks off a new wave of enthusiasm for the former president. But I’m skeptical. We all just endured a long, nasty, and exhausting midterm-election cycle, and we’re about a week and a half away from Thanksgiving and the Christmas season after that. A lot of Americans want a respite from politics and attacks going back and forth. This is traditionally the winding-down and more jovial part of the year. Now Trump is going to burst through the door with his off-the-cuff observations that the surname Youngkin “sounds Chinese,” and that he always thought Virginia lieutenant governor Winsome Sears was a phony, and that CNN should create a new channel that features only him, and that he won more votes in a presidential election than DeSantis won in a gubernatorial election. And the nicknames — “Coco Chow” and “DeSanctimonious.”
How many Americans were really yearning for this, for a presidential campaign to start a week after the midterm elections?
Maybe Trump will garner some advantage from announcing so early. But I doubt it. Ron DeSantis and anybody else who wants to run for president in the coming cycle can announce at a normal time, say, spring 2023, and by then Trump will likely have put the country through another five months of unhinged antics, making the country even more tired of his shtick. Yeah, yeah, stolen election, media’s corrupt, did you see what somebody said on cable news last night, everyone is so unfair to him, blah blah blah.