Donald Trump’s 2024 magic rescue fantasy isn’t working out for him
Donald Trump has now spent the entire year leaking that he was imminently launching a 2024 campaign, only for it to never happen. Yet each time he leaks yet again that it’s imminent, the media once again dutifully reports that he’s about to launch a campaign. Now Trump has the media parroting this claim once again.
This time, Trump has the media telling us, he’ll launch a 2024 campaign in a little under two weeks. It’s funny how Trump has always seemed to be two weeks away from rolling out anything and everything. We’ll see. Trump was lying the last ten times he leaked that he was about to launch a campaign. But this time he is about to be indicted, so maybe he finally will announce his fake campaign.
What’s remarkable about Trump – and it always gets ignored by the (entire) media and pundit class because it doesn’t fit the narrative – is that Trump is always tepidly too little too late with these things. He always hems and haws and waits too long to make any decision, and then once he realizes it’s too late, he sometimes tries to make up for it by overdoing it in berserk fashion.
Since his 2024 “campaign” is imaginary anyway, he could have announced it six months ago. Or the day after the Feds seized stolen classified documents from his home. But he kept waiting, and waiting, like he always tepidly does. And now his fake campaign will be widely seen as a joke. Someone who’s being indicted and put on trial for espionage against the United States is not magically going to be able to pull off simultaneously carrying out the nuts and bolts of a presidential campaign. It’s just not in any way practical.
It’s been widely pointed out that Trump may have tepidly held off announcing a 2024 campaign all this time because once he does, any campaign donations he brings in will actually be campaign donations, and will be regulated accordingly. Since he’s only been pretending like he’s running, the “campaign” donations he’s received have really just been money he can stick in his pocket. Michael Cohen, who’s been right about a lot of things, says he doesn’t think Trump will really announce a campaign, for this very reason.
But hey, maybe this time, after a year of head fakes, Trump really is about to announce his fake campaign. And if he does, we’ll address it accordingly. But the media has no business taking him at his word this time around, given that it turned out to be false every previous time he claimed it was about to happen.
And if Trump does announce a campaign, who cares? It’s far too late for him to distract anyone from the criminal charges everyone knows he’s facing. And yet it’s far too early in the 2024 cycle for it to insulate him from prosecution in any way shape or form. It’s pointless.
This is a desperate man, already broken and defeated, already a lock for prison, trying to convince himself that he has some kind of magic carpet rescue coming. If he announces he’s running for President, that’ll mean he’s way too powerful to be indicted or put in prison, right? Except nothing works that way, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has already publicly said that nothing works that way. Trump is just trying to find a way to comfort himself on his way to prison, by telling himself reassuring fables about how he’s somehow invincible. Announcing a campaign, or even leaking that he’s supposedly about to announce a campaign, is a way for him to keep his comforting rescue fantasy alive in his own head for awhile.
Donald Trump deserves to be this broken, this hopeless, this pathetic. But really, this is just sad to watch. Even sadder that the (entire) media will pretend it’s real and viable. If Trump once again fails to launch his mythical campaign this time, perhaps next time the media will do its job by applying proper context to Trump’s claim, instead of merely parroting his words.
