Outgoing US President Donald Trump addresses guests at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on January 20, 2021. (Photo by ALEX EDELMAN / AFP) (Photo by ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Former President Donald Trump reportedly believes he’s going to be reinstated as president within the next four years, according to Maggie Haberman. And according to Donald Trump.After the New York Times reporter said earlier this month that Trump has been telling confidantes that “he expects he will be reinstated by August,” the former president himself confirmed that with a line tucked into the end of his latest screed about Saturday Night Live: “2024 or before!”
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Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, also nodded toward the belief that Trump will be reinstated.
The idea that Trump can be “reinstated” to the presidency without winning a third run in 2024 has no basis in reality. Even if President Joe Biden were to leave or be removed from office in some way, former presidents don’t appear anywhere on the line of succession, which includes the vice president, Speaker of the House, Senate president pro tempore, and the Cabinet.But that hasn’t stopped Trump supporters from believing he could actually return to office without winning another election. A Politico/Morning Consult poll earlier this month found that nearly a third of Republicans think he’ll be reinstated as president sometime this year, and another last week found that as many as half of all Trump voters believe election “audits” such as the one in Arizona will “change the outcome” of the election. Yes, the same election that Joe Biden won over six months ago. Earlier on Tuesday, Trump highlighted Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s purge of more than 100,000 names from the voter rolls and complained that it wasn’t done last year, when he lost Georgia by more than 11,000 votes. “WHY WASN’T THIS DONE PRIOR TO THE NOVEMBER 3RD PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, where they had us losing by a very small number of votes, many times less than the 101,789 figure?” Trump said in a statement. “This means we (you!) won the Presidential Election in Georgia.” The only problem with that theory is that, according to Raffensperger spokesperson Walter C. Jones, the names removed from the list account for zero of last year’s votes. “These are people who have not voted in nine years,” Jones told VICE News Wednesday. The vast majority of those names purged from the list either changed their address through the Post Office or had election mail returned as undeliverable, Jones said.“If they had any interaction with the voter registration system, then they would not be on the list,” he added. “And absolutely none of them voted."