Trump's IRS audit, Twitter ban and failing brand will prevent him from 2024 presidential run: 'Lot of baggage'
A political expert who rightly predicted former President Donald J. Trump's victory in 2016 has now declared that his chances of running for office in 2024 are very slim due to the "baggage" he accrued during his presidency. The prediction comes from political historian Allan Lichtman, who is said to have accurately called the outcomes of seven out of eight presidential elections in the last three decades, the Independent reported.
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"He’s got $400 million-plus in loans coming due. His brand is failing. His businesses are failing. He has a huge IRS audit. He doesn’t hold office anymore. He’s lost his Twitter,” Lichtman told the Miami Herald. “That’s a lot of baggage for somebody to run for president."
The celebrated political analyst and historian has reportedly made predictions for every election since 1984. His only wrong prediction came in 2000, when his forecast of an Al Gore victory against George Bush proved to be inaccurate.
Lichtman bases his predictions on a series of "13 keys" or questions that help analyze whether a candidate will win a presidential election. He has explained his system in detail in his recent book, 'Predicting the Next President'.
Lichtman is said to be one of few analysts to have predicted Trump's 2016 upset victory over Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, he also forecast that the Republican juggernaut would lose in 2020, despite his claims of widespread voter fraud.
About the possibility of a 2024 run, Lichtman said that Trump's resources will be "greatly diminished" by the time of the next election even if he keeps attacking the Democrats from outside Washington, D.C.
Lichtman then went on to praise Biden's executive orders on voting rights, climate change, and coronavirus relief, saying he started his presidency "incredibly well." He said that vice president Kamala Harris was an “obvious choice” for 2024, but he "wouldn’t count Biden out" despite his age. "There's no precedent in American history for starting the presidency at age 78, either. But, as we know, precedents are made to be broken," he added.
Prior to the 2020 polls, Lichtman predicted a Biden victory and explained his logic behind it. “In 2016, Trump was the challenger. I gauged that exactly six keys were turned against the incumbent party, the Democrats,” he told US News in October. “I said that this was going to be a change election – any generic Republican was going to beat any generic Democrat.”
That said, Trump made quite the comeback speech in late February at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after being muzzled by social media giants. The 45th POTUS maintained he won the November election, criticized his successor's first weeks in office, and even teased future political ambitions.
"We began it together four years ago and it is far from being over," Trump told the audience at CPAC. "And you know what this is? The hardest working people, hard-working American patriots, it's just getting started and in the end, we will win. We will win," he added.