Trump's 2024 Presidential Bid Unlikely to Survive Republican Primaries - Experts

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign for the White House is unlikely to make it through the Republican primary elections, and could actually boost the Democratic Party in the long run, analysts told Sputnik.

Trump announced his latest presidential bid on Tuesday, a week after the Republican Party failed to gain control of the Senate and an anticipated broad wave of support for them never materialized in the House midterms.

The Republicans seized control of the lower chamber on Wednesday, although by a smaller margin than expected.

A number of Trump-endorsed candidates saw mixed outcomes in last week's midterms, which the former president himself described as "disappointing."

On Wednesday, Reuters said a poll found that a majority of Americans do not want Trump to run again while President Joe Biden aides are saying they would welcome a rematch.

"I don’t think he’d survive the primaries," George Mason University Scalia Law School Professor Francis Buckley told Sputnik.

Trump's campaign, he added, will be purely negative for the Republican Party and a "boon to the Democrats."

Trump would also face stiff competition for the nomination from a new generation of rising Republican leaders including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who won a landslide victory over his old opponent Charles Crist last week, and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, Buckley suggested.

Constitutional historian and political commentator Dan Lazare warned that Trump would carry a lot of damaging baggage into the contest for the 2024 nomination from his last days as outgoing president in 2021.

"He's got one big problem: January 6, 2021. If the midterms showed anything, it's that the democratic process is hard on candidates who are anti-democratic. Voters don't elect candidates who think that elections don't count," he said. "This is why Trump-backed Republicans did so poorly and why six out of seven election-deniers running for the office of secretary of state went down in defeat."

As an experienced politician, Trump clearly understood this lesson and was trying to learn from it, Lazare acknowledged.

"Trump has clearly gotten the message, which is why he didn't mention the allegedly stolen 2020 elections once in last night's speech. It was an amazing omission considering that he previously mentioned them at every turn. But now he wants to turn the subject to other things," he said.

However, this tactic would not be easy for the former president to carry out since Democrats could now be counted on to bring up the Capitol Hill riots at every opportunity, Lazare commented.

"I think we may finally be entering the post-Trump era," Lazare said.

However, national events could still revive Trump's electoral prospects over the next two years, Lazare added.

"This assumes that the economy doesn't crash, that the United States doesn't send troops to the Ukraine, or that missiles don't start flying tomorrow across the Strait of Taiwan, all of which would be grist for Trump's mill," he said.

If any of those things happened, then Trump would once more be a viable candidate, Lazare said

"I think people should never underestimate Trump. He's a much more powerful personality than DeSantis, he commands the stage like no one else in American politics, and his special brand of populism and isolationism still packs plenty of punch," he said.