According to his niece Mary, Donald Trump will “pretend” to run for president in 2024 to collect funds before finally dropping out.
Since leaving the White House in January, Trump has attempted to maintain his status as the center of political attention within the Republican Party.
On Saturday, he teased a 2024 run against the Conservative Political Party, falsely claiming that he defeated the Democrats last year and saying that he “may even decide to beat them for a third time.”
Mary Trump, who published a highly critical book about her uncle last year, told MSNBC on Monday that Trump would continue to tease a presidential run in the 2024 election because he had raised large sums of money from supporters since he lost the election to Biden by falsely claiming victory.
As he continued to promote unfounded allegations of systemic voter fraud to his allies, Trump has collected at least $150 million in contributions opposing the outcome of November’s election.
According to Ashley Collman of Insider, the rest of the funds will be used to finance the president’s political future.
Mary Trump told MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, “I think he’s going to pretend to [run].”
“Think about how much money he’s made off the big lie over the last few months. He’s made more money since President Biden won the election than I think he has in his entire life. So I don’t think he’s going to let that grift go quite so soon.”
Trump predicted that her uncle would not run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 because he is afraid of losing.
She said, “There’s no way that he is going to put himself in the position of losing again. The problem is the Republican party seems determined to keep him legitimate, which is the really scary part.”
Despite losing to President Joe Biden last year, several influential Republican lawmakers have already begun to explore the possibility of Trump running for president in 2024.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this weekend that he would “absolutely” support Trump for the next presidential nomination, while Sen. Lindsey Graham has said that he intends to use Trump’s political image to win the House and Senate in 2022.
Senator Mitt Romney, who voted in February to convict Trump on impeachment charges related to the Capitol riot, estimated that if Trump wanted to run in 2024, he would win by a “landslide.”
He told listeners during an interview with the New York Times project, “I look at the polls, and the polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024 if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide.”
