There was a time, not so long ago, when those wearied and horrified by the presidency of Donald J. Trump could almost convince themselves that the man was gone.
He was ostensibly a movement leader in exile, simmering in Florida, his flailing election lies confined to private monologues and modest platforms. He was no longer appearing on Fox News, the most powerful media organ of the right. His screeds on Truth Social did not land with the force of their tweeted predecessors. Even as a declared presidential candidate for the past 14 months, Mr. Trump often ceded the campaign trail to his rivals (who mostly fought one another, instead of him), skipping debates and appearing only episodically at public engagements that were not matters of the courts.
But with his landslide victory in Iowa, codifying his double-fisted hold on wide swaths of the Republican electorate, two conclusions were inescapable by Tuesday morning.
Mr. Trump is back as the dominant figure in American political life — destined again to be ubiquitous, his entwined legal and electoral dramas set to shadow the nation’s consequential year.
He also never actually left.
After a White House term that often consumed the national psyche hour by hour — stirring his supporters and panicking his critics with each wayward post and norm-busting impulse, culminating in the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021 — some Trump-fatigued members of both parties and the political press seemed at times to be wishing him away, as if media oxygen alone had sustained him the last eight years.
Maybe he wouldn’t really run again, some imagined. Maybe, like a boxer, he’d punch himself out. Maybe the Republican Party, punished at the polls in several elections since his 2016 triumph, would find its way to someone else.
Instead, if Mr. Trump wins next week’s New Hampshire primary, a march to a third nomination is all but certain. His detractors own no earplugs effective enough to block that out.
“Very few Democrats — apart from the deeply paranoid or intuitive — would have told you in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection that Trump would be the Republican nominee again in 2024,” said David Axelrod, who was a top adviser to President Barack Obama. “Once again, his feral genius for shaping a story of victimhood and commanding his base was underestimated.”
Mr. Trump, of course, did not have to speak much to keep his base with him. And as a candidate over the past year, the more he talked about the 91 criminal charges against him, the more Republicans returned to him.
Democrats are keenly aware that for all the attention paid to Mr. Trump’s indictments and his voluntary visits to some of his civil trials, his plans for a new term and his incendiary statements are far less visible to the general public. Some in the news media were reluctant to direct their audiences to Mr. Trump, especially shortly after he left office, for fear that it would only amplify his lies about his election loss. Privately, some on the left lament that Twitter’s suspension of Mr. Trump’s account — after the Jan. 6 attack — served only to remove him from view.
Since 2016, both Republican and Democratic leaders have often agreed that it helps Democrats to have Mr. Trump at the political fore. His failed re-election in 2020 became, in large part, a referendum on his rampaging tenure. The 2022 midterms, a disappointment for Republicans, came after a drumbeat of congressional hearings about Mr. Trump’s conduct on and around Jan. 6, a kind of rolling television series — with videos produced by a former television executive — dedicated to what House members called his crimes against democracy.
Mr. Axelrod noted that Mr. Trump, after a primary season in which his top-polling rivals have tiptoed around him, is preparing to face President Biden, “an opponent far less reticent about attacking.”
Democrats are plainly hoping that Mr. Trump’s abundant legal peril will remind voters once more of the chaos that has often trailed him. Mr. Biden has signaled his plans to highlight Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert his loss in the 2020 election, invoking the attack on the Capitol and Mr. Trump’s revisionist history of what happened.
But it is unclear whether Mr. Trump’s trial on federal charges stemming from his efforts to remain in power, which is currently scheduled to take place in March, will occur before Election Day as he challenges the validity of the indictment. And absent a trial, the Biden team’s ability to focus public attention on the events of Jan. 6 is far from assured.
Polling has captured the degree to which Mr. Trump has been speaking mostly to Republicans to date — and shaping their thinking about the violence that followed his 2020 loss. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland survey showed that far fewer Republicans blame Mr. Trump for the Jan. 6 attack than did in 2021. More than two-thirds of Republicans said it was “time to move on.”
“The overwhelming majority of Americans are aware of Trump’s legal troubles, and a significant number say that a conviction would have some bearing on their vote,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “But absent the spectacle of a pre-election trial and adjudication, it’s not clear that awareness is enough in an environment where the former president polls stronger than either of his previous elections.”
As a candidate in Iowa, Mr. Trump was often conspicuously outworked by his competitors. He showed little interest in changing or modulating. It did not come close to mattering, at least not in Iowa, and his court appearances often created their own sense of motion, despite having nothing to do with actual politicking.
And so Mr. Trump — who detests little more than being mocked, who delights in little more than doing the mocking — found on Monday an early-state validation that eluded him eight years ago, when he lost in Iowa (and insisted falsely that the caucuses were stolen from him).
But even back then, he seemed to grasp something that many others came to realize much later. In a 2016 speech in New Hampshire, just before his first primary win, he observed: “A lot of people have laughed at me over the years.”
“Now,” he said, “they’re not laughing so much, I’ll tell you.”
