The media is finally halfway admitting Donald Trump isn’t really going to be a part of 2024
Chris Christie, who gets paid a lot of money to say whatever his bosses at ABC News want him to say on any given day, now says there’s only a 50-50 chance Trump will run in 2024. The media knows that the public is starting to figure out Trump won’t really be part of 2024, and is incrementally backing away from its “Trump 2024” ratings hype accordingly.
It’s been clear for a year and a half that Trump is more likely to be in prison (or given his seemingly advancing senility, an assisted living facility) by 2024 than in a presidential race. But the media has ignored this and instead spent the past year and a half insisting there was a 100% chance Trump would be the 2024 nominee and that he’d likely win it all.
Now that the average mainstream media audience member is finally starting to figure out that Trump 2024 isn’t a real thing, the media is downgrading Trump’s odds of running from 100% to 50%. The media knows it has to cover its backside now, in case Trump announces he’s not running.
It’s still tough to predict precisely how Trump will handle what’s happening to him. For now he’s pretending he’s running and he’s taking in quasi-campaign donations that he can just pocket because they’re not regulated like they would be if he were actually running.
For the past six months Trump has repeatedly leaked to various major news outlets that he was going to imminently announce a 2024 campaign – presumably so the media would keep hyping him. But he’s never actually gone through with those “imminent” plans, presumably to protect those unregulated donations.
Trump has now missed his window of opportunity to announce a campaign before the average American learned that he’s under federal criminal investigation. That wouldn’t have helped him legally, but it might have helped in a messaging and fundraising sense. It’s too late now though.
Trump’s consistent pattern of behavior in politics over the years has been to tepidly wait too long to make a move, and then once he realizes it’s too late, he tries an overboard move that makes a lot of noise and stirs up a lot of controversy but is too late to help him.
This suggests that Trump will nervously sit on his hands until he’s indicted (or those closest to him are indicted, or flip on him), and then he’ll announce a 2024 campaign – a dumb approach because at that point everyone will know exactly why he’s making such an announcement, and will dismiss his candidacy.
Remember, it’s not about what his base thinks. They’re not why he won in 2016. They couldn’t save him in 2020. They’re irrelevant to 2024. This is about Trump convincing average Americans that he’s legitimately running (even if most of them oppose him), so the media will feel safe hyping that he’s legitimately running.
Of course, given his worsening cognitive issues in his public appearances, and the manner in which his handlers seem to be running the show with those “press releases” they write and release in his name, we can’t assume there’s enough of Trump’s mind left to even make such decisions for himself.
It’s possible Trump’s handlers could decide for him that his best move is to announce he’s not running, in the hope the public will lose interest in seeing him imprisoned. This wouldn’t impact any DOJ decisions. But Trump’s camp is surely at the point of wishful thinking by now, and that can lead to unpredictable panic moves.
This brings us back to the media. Even if Trump announces a 2024 campaign at this point, the media will have a hard time selling it to audiences as a legitimate campaign that would even still exist by 2024. And at this point Trump could also potentially announce he’s not running. So the media has to cover its backside by now suggesting it’s 50-50 as to whether Trump will run.
And this is why a major media outlet pays millions of dollars to an unscrupulous big-name has-been like Chris Christie. Whenever it needs to shift its narratives, it can put whatever words it wants in Christie’s mouth, and most of the public will think it’s legitimately news. In reality, the media is simply starting to back away from a nonsense narrative that helped ratings for a year and a half, but is now in danger of collapsing.
