Trump Isn’t Going Anywhere

Mobilizing the MAGA forces may not be as easy when he’s out of power. His Twitter feed is a less essential read now that he can’t use it to threaten nuclear war. Once Trump leaves office, social-media networks may be less tolerant of his messages that promote conspiracy theories, peddle misinformation, and run afoul of their rules. Already, Twitter has gotten bolder about flagging tweets that make baseless claims. On Wednesday, the company attached a warning label to a tweet in which Trump claimed, without evidence, that Democrats were “trying to STEAL the Election.”

If Trump’s abuse of social media persists, tech companies may consider “terminating his account,” Leonard Niehoff, who teaches the First Amendment and media law at the University of Michigan Law School, told me. “Once he’s no longer president, when everything he says is a matter of public interest, then you get into a fairness argument. If he’s abusing the platform, why give him more opportunities for abuse than anyone else gets?” (When I asked the company how it might handle Trump after he leaves, a Twitter spokesperson explained that “people should be able to choose to see what their leaders are saying with clear context. This means that we may apply warnings and labels, and limit engagement to certain Tweets. This policy framework applies to current world leaders and candidates for office, and not private citizens when they no longer hold these positions.”)

One way Trump can guarantee his continued relevance and keep his supporters enthralled is to flirt with the notion of running for president again. He’s done it before, teasing presidential runs in past decades only to hold back in the end. He wouldn’t need to be serious about the idea; floating a comeback would be enough to commandeer attention.

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Allies aver that another run isn’t mere fantasy. Trump will be 78 years old when the 2024 election arrives, the same age Biden will be when he takes office in January. If Biden moves further left and is seen as out of step with the electorate, Trump could find an opening, one adviser told me. Should Biden push a “socialist agenda, I don’t think you’ll have seen the end of Donald Trump,” Corey Lewandowski, a senior Trump-campaign adviser, told me ahead of Election Day.

Either way, Trump has left an imprint that isn’t easily erased. He’s coarsened the nation’s political dialogue, showing that a politician can mislead and prevaricate, demean and humiliate, and still win the presidency. He mishandled a pandemic that so far has killed 230,000 people and tanked the economy. People worldwide will be living with Trump’s legacy deep into his post-presidency. In that sense, too, he’s not going away.

“Despite all the misleading statements Donald Trump has made, he has never fallen much below 40 percent approval,” Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to the United States, told me. “That’s pretty solid. What does that tell you? That we’re living in a post-truth world. Politicians around the world will be looking at this and saying, ‘You can get away with it.’ It’s a shift in the landscape that may be irreversible.”

Peter Nicholas is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers the White House.