Thanks to 77,744 voters in three key states on November 8, 2016, the Electoral College not only catapulted a bemused Trump into the White House but eliminated his chief electoral rival. With Clinton in the White House, he could have continued in quasi-campaign mode as a kind of shadow president, without all the onerous tasks of an actual commander-in-chief. The relentless stigmatizing of the Democratic standard bearer - the threats of legal action, the “lock her up” chants, the hints at dark conspiracies - could easily have morphed into a new “birther” movement led by Trump himself. He understood that attacking Clinton had real potential to become a post-election profession.īefore Election Day, for instance, Trump was already exploring the possibility of establishing his own TV network to cater to the anti-Clinton base he’d mobilized. Although he reveled in all the media attention during the 2016 campaign, he was far more focused on the economic benefits to his cohort, his businesses, his family, and above all himself. And this wasn’t even a commitment to run again for president.

In other words, Trump was already gearing up to go after her in 2020.

The attacks he’d launched on Hillary Clinton during the campaign - on her health, her integrity, her email account - were not only designed to savage an opponent but also to undermine in advance the person that everyone expected to be the next president. Before his surprise victory, Trump described the election many times as “rigged” and seemed poised to declare the vote illegitimate as soon as the final returns rolled in. His wife, Melania, assured by her husband that he’d lose, reportedly wept as the news came in that she would indeed be heading for the White House. After all, no one seems to have been more surprised by his victory that day than Trump himself.Īccording to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and his personal attorney Michael Cohen, even on election night 2016, the billionaire tycoon didn’t think he’d win his first presidential bid. In much the same way that Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once embraced “permanent revolution,” Donald Trump embarked on a “permanent campaign.”īut The Donald was fixated on 2020 even before he pulled off the upset of the century on November 8, 2016. After all, he’d already spent much of the December before his inauguration on a ”thank you” tour of the swing states that had unexpectedly supported him on Election Day - Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin - and visited Florida for a rally only a couple of weeks after he took the oath of office.

For a man who relished the adulation and bombast of campaigning, it should have surprised no one that he charged out of the starting gate so quickly for 2020 as well. Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements.

Shadow president pol