Trump's ready for his big moment, though he's been winning without one
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- Former President Donald Trump is a driver's seat to reclaim the White House.
- In fact, he's in the position of any Republican presidential hopeful in over two decades.
- What's all the more remarkable is Trump has kept a lower profile of late.
Donald Trump is on a winning streak, which is all the more remarkable because he's barely played the game.
On Thursday night, CNN aired live footage of a podium. It was the exact kind of shot that got the cable news network harangued in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Only it wasn't a Trump rally. The former president has held few public events since the first debate on June 27.
President Joe Biden's debate performance was so disastrous that it supplanted Trump as the biggest story in politics, a rare occurrence since Trump descended the golden escalator at his namesake New York building in 2015 to kick off his first campaign. That's why CNN was airing a live shot of a presidential podium. Biden, whose remarks have rarely been carried live throughout his presidency, is now must-see TV. Unfortunately for him, it's only because every utterance risks potentially hurting his standing even more.
Trump is set to try to reclaim the spotlight in the days ahead. First, he will name his long-awaited vice presidential pick. Then, he will formally accept the Republican Party's presidential nomination at the national convention in Milwaukee.
Trump is the current favorite to win in November.
Trump can also afford to take time away. He's in the strongest position any Republican presidential hopeful has been in July since George W. Bush in 2000. His top campaign advisors boasted to The Atlantic that Trump could win in a blowout. Democrats are concerned that far-fetched possibility is now quite possible with political prognosticators putting New Hampshire and Minnesota into play. If the bottom falls out, Virginia, New Mexico, and Maine's two-statewide Electoral College votes could follow suit.
"President Biden has spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second presidential term in November than Donald Trump," former Clinton advisor Doug Sosnik wrote in The New York Times on Friday. "But for reasons that have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished."
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Biden's campaign conceded that their standing has dipped since the debate, but emphasized that they still have "multiple" paths to victory.
"Our internal data and public polling show the same thing: this remains a margin-of-error race in key battleground states," Biden's campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in a memo to staffers that was first published by The Associated Press and later obtained by Business Insider.
Since the debate, Biden has faced almost daily onslaught of Democrats calling him to step aside. Capitol Hill, once bursting over with liberal schadenfreude as pro-Trump allies like Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia needled their leadership, is now the site of a Democratic Party in disarray. If Biden does stay in the race, Republicans have a plethora of statements from fellow Democrats questioning his ability to lead.
Trump hasn't fundamentally changed. Even as he's refrained from rallies, he's still ranting on social media. He's attacked reporters and even went after George Clooney, an especially odd post given that the actor was in the news for saying Biden should drop out. Trump also handed Biden's campaign a major gift by offering one of his signature "I don't know them" denials about Project 2025. This Heritage Foundation-led project seeks to shape a future Repubican's next administration with proposals to restrict abortion access without passing new laws (including reversal approval of the drug mifepristone), replace a large number of federal employees with political allies, and even consider the elimination of many of the functions for the agency that oversees the National Weather Service.
It wasn't just the debate, either. Less than 24 hours before the faceoff, the Supreme Court handed down a pair of rulings that the former president welcomed enthusiastically as they further weakened the administrative state and narrowed the degree to which federal prosecutors could go after January 6 Capitol rioters. Then, days after the debate, the court handed Trump a much more sweeping than expected victory in ruling that former presidents have some immunity from criminal prosecution related to their official acts while in office. Trump's legal team is even trying to argue that the landmark decision should mean that his New York criminal conviction should be vacated.
The GOP convention will reflect Trump's influence.
The Republican National Convention has all the makings of the two big Trump shows before it. Model Amber Rose, one of Kanye West's exes, is set to speak. So, too, is Dana White; according to The Wall Street Journal, the UFC head will speak right before Trump — the type of high-profile slot that parties used to dole out to rising stars. Trump already has a bare-bones platform that favors his views on key issues like abortion, to the chagrin of more traditional conservatives like his former Vice President Mike Pence.
It remains to be seen if Trump will retake the headlines, particularly if Biden's future is still undecided. Then again, it won't really matter. Even without all the oxygen, the former president is still on fire.