So much for Trump 2024
Donald Trump has spent the past year and a half hinting that he’s going to run for President in 2024, and raking in quasi-campaign donations the whole time. But even after he spent the past six months repeatedly leaking to the media that he was planning to imminently announce his campaign, he never did. Then the media confirmed last month that the DOJ had been investigating Trump for several months, meaning Trump missed the window of opportunity to announce a campaign before the average person found out he was only doing it to distract from the criminal investigation he was under. Now Trump has really missed the window.
The DOJ had the FBI carry out a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home today, making abundantly clear to the average American that Trump is under federal criminal investigation, and that he’s more likely to be in prison by 2024 than in a presidential race. Trump’s base will squeal, but they’re irrelevant to the process. With mainstream Americans now understanding that any Trump 2024 campaign will be nonsense, the mainstream media won’t try to take any such campaign seriously. But there’s more.
This raid wasn’t a part of the DOJ’s investigation into Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme, but instead part of the DOJ’s separate investigation into Donald Trump’s theft of highly classified documents. Marc Elias noted that under the law, anyone who’s convicted of stealing classified evidence is disqualified from office. It’s actually one of the relatively few things under the law that can disqualify you from office.
So if Trump were to be convicted of stealing documents – and that’s now likely, given that the DOJ already would have needed to have strong evidence of his guilt just to obtain today’s warrant – he wouldn’t be allowed to become President in 2024 even if he did announce he was running. Any Trump 2024 campaign was just going to be a scam anyway. But this would completely delegitimize any notion of Trump 2024, thus perhaps discouraging Trump from even pretending he’s running.
