Trump’s series of unfortunate events: 2024 announcement seemed like a tipping point
Cami Mondeaux
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Ever since he announced his third bid for the White House, former President Donald Trump has been hit with one setback after another.
At the height of the midterm election season, he was boosting candidates, and the Republican Party seemed inescapably under his influence. A second reelection bid was gathering momentum.
But flash-forward to the final weeks of 2022 and things have changed drastically. His Nov. 15 campaign launch, which occurred just a week after the midterm elections while several key races had yet to be called, was met with mixed responses from GOP lawmakers and hostility from conservative commentators.
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Trump might have expected to gain an advantage by announcing so early, but he is dogged by a growing pile of controversies that threaten to sink his presidential bid before it gets properly started.
Here is a breakdown of several major challenges that threaten Trump’s chance of a second White House term:
Criminal investigations
One of the highest-profile threats looming over Trump’s head is the slate of criminal investigations he is under heading into the 2024 cycle.
Most notably, there are several criminal investigations into his attempts to overturn 2020’s presidential election results and his role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. It is unclear that the former president will be charged, but the Jan. 6 committee has issued four criminal referrals of Trump for his role in the riot.
The former president is also at the center of a handful of other investigations into the 2020 election, including one headed by the Department of Justice and another by a special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia.
The DOJ investigation has asked witnesses about meetings Trump held in December 2020 and January 2021 to consider actions to overturn the election, as well as the former president’s pressure campaign on former Vice President Mike Pence to assist that effort on Jan. 6.
That investigation seeks to uncover what orders Trump gave his attorneys and senior officials.
There are two other paths that could lead to additional scrutiny of Trump, sources say.
One centers on seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct a government proceeding, similar to charges levied against people who were arrested after storming the Capitol, some of whom have been convicted. Another involves charging Trump with fraud for a plot to use a substitute slate of electors or his efforts to pressure the DOJ to overturn the results.
The DOJ has also opened a separate investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, where FBI agents recovered classified documents that Trump took from the White House when he left office.
Release of tax documents
Trump received another blow after the House Ways and Means Committee voted on Tuesday to release a trove of documents detailing his tax returns, giving the public access to long-awaited information related to the former president’s financial records.
After a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill, the panel voted 24-16 to release six years’ worth of tax returns to the broader House of Representatives. The Joint Committee on Taxation posted a separate report online shortly afterward. The release comes after House Democrats gained access to the records earlier this month, ostensibly to fulfill their oversight duty to examine whether the IRS audit of the former president was conducted “fully and appropriately.”
Although sitting presidents’ tax returns are “subject to mandatory review” by the Internal Revenue Service, the agency failed to conduct one during Trump’s first two years in office, according to the committee’s report. Throughout the course of Trump’s term, the IRS only began one audit, which wasn’t completed before he left the White House in 2021, the panel found. It’s unclear why the audits were not conducted, and the report does not suggest Trump pressured the agency.
But the report did show that the former president repeatedly paid little or nothing in federal income taxes from 2015 to 2020, often claiming major business losses to offset his income, according to the report.
Trump declared negative income on his federal returns in 2015, 2016, and 2017, with $0 taxable income for each year, according to the report. The report by Democrats on Tuesday found, however, that the former president was making tens of millions of dollars annually from 2015 to 2020.
Trump under fire for hosting Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago
Trump came under fire after he hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the antisemitic rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) at Mar-a-Lago in late November.
The backlash was swift due to Ye’s and Fuentes’s controversial reputations, with the latter being deemed a “white nationalist” for making antisemitic and racist remarks on social media and his web show. Trump responded by calling the dinner “quick and uneventful.”
The former president reportedly ignored repeated calls from advisers to disavow Fuentes after his meeting, citing concerns that distancing himself would alienate his supporters, a source told the Guardian. Instead, Trump released statements defending his meeting with Ye while making little mention of Fuentes’s presence at the dinner, later writing that he “didn’t know” him.
Herschel Walker loss in Georgia Senate runoff
Despite having early confidence in his hand-picked candidates ahead of the midterm elections, Trump’s endorsement record took a hit after the votes were counted on Election Day. Among the most consequential endorsement losses for the former president was that of Republican Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff.
Walker lost the high-profile Senate race to Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), whose victory secured a 51-49 majority for Democrats in the upper chamber for the next two years. Walker’s loss, paired with the GOP’s worse-than-expected performance in the midterm elections as a whole — Trump’s picks did especially badly — sparked an intraparty blame game within the GOP.
Some Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), suggested the party’s losses were due to candidates being “crushed by independent voters,” referring to his earlier warnings about “candidate quality” damaging GOP chances. Several GOP lawmakers piled on to that theory after Walker’s loss, shifting the blame to Trump.
Trump trailing Biden and DeSantis in 2024 matchups
What may be the biggest ding to Trump’s reelection chances is early polling that shows the former president losing to President Joe Biden and also to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in hypothetical matchups in 2024.
Although DeSantis has not indicated whether he’ll seek a White House bid, the Florida governor is considered to be a top contender and favorite among the party as an alternative to Trump. Several polls conducted in recent weeks show DeSantis ahead of Trump, with the Wall Street Journal finding the Republican governor beating the former president 52% to 38%.
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It is too early to determine which candidate has the best chance of victory in the next presidential election, and the GOP primary field is expected to become more crowded soon.
Early polling also suggests Biden would have the advantage in a hypothetical rematch between him and Trump, with a recent YouGov poll showing the president leading his predecessor 45% to 41%.