American history offers plenty of examples of presidential candidates who ran, lost, and later launched successful comeback bids. Even President Joe Biden ran two failed national campaigns before ultimately reaching the White House. There’s even some historical precedent for a former president losing the office and then returning four years later: Grover Cleveland did it in the late 19th century.
But there’s still something qualitatively different about the political circumstances we find ourselves in. NBC News reported overnight:
Donald Trump, the only president impeached twice, launched a campaign to reclaim the Oval Office on Tuesday, two years after voters ousted him and a week after they rejected his hand-picked candidates in several pivotal Senate races. … Trump promised the future would resemble the past if he is elected, and his speech rehashed scores of old grievances and conspiracies: The FBI is corrupt and out to get him; the voting system is rife with fraud. He littered his address with inaccuracies, some old, some new.
The speech itself was a meandering, brazenly dishonest and at times pitiful mess, in which the former president described himself as “a victim.” Much of the Republican’s dour message was predicated on the idea that Americans have not yet fully come to terms with the nation’s deterioration — though by 2024, the widespread ruin will likely be worse, at which point voters might be willing to give Trump another try.
“The citizens of our country have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through, and the total effect of the suffering is just starting to take hold,” he said. “They don’t quite feel it yet, but they will very soon. I have no doubt that by 2024 it will sadly be much worse, and they will see much more clearly what happened and what is happening to our country. And the voting will be much different.”
Uplifting it was not.
But even more jarring than the uninspired lies was the broader context that Trump was content to ignore. He left office early last year as a loser who had failed in a job he didn’t understand and was unprepared to fill. As we discussed upon his departure, the Republican lost the popular vote twice. He was impeached twice. He faced a criminal investigation while in office. Trump was the first modern president to leave office with fewer Americans working than when he started. He’s the first modern president whose approval rating never reached 50%.
Four years after his political party controlled the White House, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House, his party lost control of all three — a first for any president since the Great Depression. Two years later, the GOP he leads struggled again at the ballot box, in large part because the former president wouldn’t go away.
After being rejected by his country’s electorate, Trump refused to accept the verdict, tried to claim illegitimate power, and deployed radicalized followers to violently attack the nation’s seat of government as part of an attempted coup. Given Trump’s overt rejection of democracy, scholars consider him one of the worst presidents, if not the very worst, in American history.
And yet, there he was at his glorified country club last night, launching yet another national campaign, as if there were a broad appetite for fresh failure. Hanging overhead was an inconvenient truth: The new front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 is a suspected criminal facing multiple ongoing investigations — in Georgia over alleged election interference, and simultaneously at the federal level, where the Justice Department is scrutinizing both his alleged Jan. 6 misdeeds and his decision to take highly classified national security documents to Mar-a-Lago. And did I mention that Trump’s scandalous business enterprise is also actively on trial right now in New York on fraud charges? And that his former White House chief of staff, just this week, accused him of illegally trying to weaponize the Internal Revenue Service? As Rachel put it on Monday night’s show, many have launched presidential campaigns, but until now, none has done so while “enveloped in a suffocating fog of scandal.” Trump is making history, but not in a good way.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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