Donald Trump hasn’t announced if he’s going to run for president again in 2024, but it seems like an inescapable possibility. He’s already teasing a new campaign slogan — “Make America Great Again, Again” — and holding campaign-style rallies in red states.
Jon Stewart thinks we should be ready for the inevitable.
“I think he’s got it. He’s got a very good chance. And they’re smarter about it,” he said over the weekend at The New Yorker Festival. “The danger of the coup — again, Jan. 6 is the TV event moment of it. It’s the special that came out. And that’s what all the TV networks were focused on.” Trump is “brilliant at understanding what will drive the television narratives,” The Problem with Jon Stewart host noted, and the ratings prove it.
Stewart laid out his theory for how it could happen:
“What I think they really learned from this exercise was there are really specific pivot points within the American electoral system,” he elaborated. “And those pivot points are generally the administration of elections run by partisans, but not ideologues. In other words, a lot of those, a lot of the real mechanics and logistics of elections are run by Democrats or Republicans, partisans, but they are administrative positions. If he can replace the administrative functionaries with ideologues, he’s removed almost all of the guard rails that stopped this present one.”
Stewart thought Trump would disqualify himself with everything he said and did before the 2016 election, but “for those of us who have been in New York, we probably saw like, if nothing else, the dude’s resilient. Like very few people can bankrupt that many things and still continue on with that kind of success.” Just not as much success as before.