Is he back? Trump is doing everything to show that he is

NOT a week goes by without an email from this or that friend from overseas that reads something like this: "Please tell me that what I've been told, that Donald Trump is going to run for president in 2024 - and worse than that, that he could actually get re-elected - is a joke. Right?" Well, I respond to these emails by suggesting that neither would probably happen. But then I recall that almost everyone did not believe that he would be nominated as his party's presidential candidate and then beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race, and that he almost got re-elected 4 years later.

Which goes to show you . . . what? I am not sure. Perhaps that you should not overestimate the intelligence of the American voter. The electoral reality as measured by most opinion polls is that the former president remains extremely popular among Republican voters. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS showed that 63 per cent of Republicans and 37 per cent of Republican-leaning independents say Trump should be the leader of the Republican Party. As many as two-thirds of Republicans agree that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. An October Quinnipiac poll found that 66 per cent of Republicans do not view the storming of the US Capitol on Jan 6 as an attack on the government - reflecting the extent to which the Republican electoral base has been "Trumpised".

A November Marquette Law School poll found that 60 per cent of Republicans say that Trump should run again in 2024; 73 per cent of independents and 94 per cent of Democrats are opposed to the idea.