Does Donald Trump have 'too much baggage' for a successful 2024 presidential run? Experts think so

22 September 2022

No president in U.S. history has faced more investigations than Donald Trump — not even Richard Nixon. Twenty months after leaving the White House, Trump is being simultaneously investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 select committee. At a time when DOJ continues to investigate the government documents that Trump was storing in a locked room at Mar-a-Lago — which is separate from DOJ’s in-depth January 6 investigation — James has filed a civil lawsuit against the Trump because of his financial activities with the Trump Organization.

Despite all that, Trump’s diehard MAGA supporters are hoping that he will seek the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. “Real Time” host Bill Maher, a scathing Trump critic, fears that if Trump is the Republican Party nominee in 2024 and loses the election, he will try to pull off a coup d’état and will be better equipped for it than he was in 2020 — setting off a constitutional crisis along with violence and unrest. But according to some legal experts, Trump is facing so much legal peril that his hopes for a 2024 presidential campaign will be derailed.

In an article published by The Guardian on September 22, journalist David Smith explains, “Donald Trump’s legal perils have become insurmountable and could snuff out the former U.S. president’s hopes of an election-winning comeback, according to political analysts and legal experts. On Wednesday, Trump and three of his adult children were accused of lying to tax collectors, lenders and insurers in a ‘staggering’ fraud scheme that routinely misstated the value of his properties to enrich themselves. The civil lawsuit, filed by New York’s attorney general, came as the FBI investigates Trump’s holding of sensitive government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and a special grand jury in Georgia considers whether he and others attempted to influence state election officials after his defeat there by Joe Biden.”

Smith continues, “The former U.S. president has repeatedly hinted that he intends to run for the White House again in 2024. But the cascade of criminal, civil and congressional investigations could yet derail that bid.”

Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., believes that Trump’s legal problems are too overwhelming for him to successfully run for president in 2024.

Lichtman told The Guardian, “He’s done. He’s got too many burdens, too much baggage to be able to run again even presuming he escapes jail, he escapes bankruptcy. I’m not sure he’s going to escape jail.”

According to Harvard University Laurence Tribe, James’ civil lawsuit against Trump and three of his children — Ivanka, Don, Jr. and Eric — is likely to cause the ex-president more headaches than the fear of a criminal indictment. Trump noted that James’ lawsuit “involves things of particular significance to Trump and his family and his organization, namely their ability to defraud the public, to defraud banks, to defraud insurance companies, and to continue to subsist through corruption.”

Tribe told The Guardian, “Without all of that corruption, the entire Trump empire is involved in something like meltdown…. Trump is probably more concerned with things of this kind than he is with having to wear an orange jumpsuit and maybe answer a criminal indictment.… As a practical matter, this is probably going to cause more sleepless nights for Mr. Trump than almost anything else.”

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