How Donald Trump went from a diminished ex-president to the GOP's dominant front-runner
CTV
The story of how Donald Trump became his party's likely nominee for a third straight presidential election is a reminder that there was an opening -- however brief -- when the GOP could have moved beyond him but didn't.
When he left the White House, Donald Trump was a pariah.
After years of bending Washington to his will with a single tweet, Trump was, at least for a moment, diminished. He was a one-term Republican president rejected by voters and then shunned by large swaths of his party after his refusal to accept his 2020 election defeat culminated in an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that sent lawmakers running for their lives.
Some members of his Cabinet had discussed invoking the 25th Amendment, seeing him unfit to remain in office. He was banned from social media and became the first president to be impeached twice. And when he departed Washington, the nation's capital was still reeling from his supporters' violence and resembled a security fortress with boarded-up storefronts and military vehicles in the streets.
Three years later, Trump is on the cusp of a stunning turnaround. With commanding victories in the first two 2024 nominating contests and wide polling leads in the states ahead, Trump is fast closing in on the Republican nomination. Already, he is the first nonincumbent Republican to win the party's contests in both Iowa and New Hampshire, and he had the largest victory margin in Iowa caucus history. His standing is expected to improve this coming week with a win in Nevada's Republican caucuses, which his last major GOP rival, Nikki Haley, will skip in favour of a competing primary, which awards no delegates.
Trump did all this while facing 91 felony charges that range from mishandling highly classified documents and conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, to paying off a porn star during his 2016 campaign. Trump is also facing a civil fraud case in New York that threatens his control of much of his business empire and was recently ordered to pay $83.3 million for defaming a woman he was previously found liable for sexually abusing.
The story of how Trump became his party's likely nominee for a third straight presidential election is a reminder that there was an opening -- however brief -- when the GOP could have moved beyond him but didn't. It shows how little was learned from 2016, as his critics once again failed to coalesce around a single alternative. And it demonstrates -- with long-standing implications for American democracy -- how Trump and his campaign seized on his unprecedented legal challenges, turning what should have been an insurmountable obstacle into a winning strategy.
"I think everybody got in the race thinking the Trump fever would break," said longtime Republican strategist Chip Saltsman, who chaired the campaign of one of Trump's rivals. "And it didn't break. It got hotter."
