If Trump Is Serious About Running, Where’s His Campaign?

President Trump’s posture as a 2024 candidate is indistinguishable from the one he’s adopted since losing the White House. The only headlines he’s generating result from activities having nothing to do with the campaign. Is this a serious effort to win a second term or something else? Merriam-Webster’s 2022 Word of the Year is “gaslighting,” defined as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.” Mr. Trump described that strategy in “The Art of the Deal,” writing, “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.”Ever since Election Night 2020, he seemed to be chomping at the bit for a rematch with President Biden, and observers expected him to hit the ground running. Instead, he gave a low-key announcement and retreated to Mar-A-Lago without follow-up events.DonaldJTrump.com/2024 offers no information, policies, or calendar of events. It’s just a single page soliciting donations with a 64-second video of the former president asking supporters to “sign up, take action,” of unspecified nature, “and volunteer,” although there’s no place to do so.To view this MAGA message — appearing above a link to “Official Trump 2024 Merch” — visitors must provide their email and phone number, although these are not verified. I tested it by using an address reserved for spam and entering 867-5309, Jenny’s digits from the 1981 song by Tommy Tutone.Running for office requires a robust online presence, but Mr. Trump’s is nonexistent. He didn’t even pick up the @realDonaldTrump megaphone after Elon Musk lifted his lifetime Twitter suspension, unlocking 88 million followers. While Mr. Trump has legal obligations to Truth Social, he could still tweet. He’s chosen, however, to stay on a version of the “Blue Thunder” helicopter’s whisper mode: Rotors spinning but not making any noise. The former commander-in-chief has only made a single update to his unlocked Twitter profile: A link to Vote.DonaldJTrump.com, which kicks to another fundraising site. This page doesn’t even offer the pitch video, but at least there’s no intrusive attempt to harvest Jenny’s contact information.For those who wonder if this candidacy provided Mr. Trump a shield against prosecution, CNN reported that running “doesn’t, by itself, give him any additional legal protections in the probes. But it does create a more complicated political and practical environment for investigators to navigate.”I asked Charles Leerhsen, ghostwriter for Mr. Trump’s book “Surviving at the Top,” what he thinks of the former president’s no-campaigning campaign. “I’m sure he’s running for the attention it brings him,” he said, “the money it brings him from his mailing list.” Being a candidate, he says, puts all of his actions, like dining with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, “on a pedestal that they wouldn’t enjoy if he was just a retired president.”That infamous dinner is the sort of news Mr. Trump has made since coming back down the figurative escalator, a scandal that would doom other candidates. Is this another play from “The Art of the Deal,” the one holding that “even a critical story, which may be hurtful personally, can be very valuable to your business”?The former president may think so, but it’s hard to see how griping about Twitter suppression in 2020 or claiming Mr. West snuck a white supremacist into his home can bring value. A man who boasted of being “a very stable genius” can’t now say he got “set up” by a rapper or that a constitutional crisis can be made out of the suppression of tweets by a private company.Mr. Trump made the choice to kick off the 2024 season right after the midterms, and if it was to gain leverage in court, scare off rivals, or lock in donors, it hasn’t accomplished any of those goals. The only thing it’s done is allow him to rake in cash.Pundits have been driven mad trying to divine just what he’s doing, but sometimes the answer is right in front of their noses: Trump ‘24 is a fund-raising operation. It may someday make the transition to campaign, but even Mr. Trump may not know if that will ever happen — or if this turns out to be his greatest gaslight of all.

If Trump Is Serious About Running, Where’s His Campaign?

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