How Was Trump Able to Come Back?

In a review of three books¹ on “The great Biden cover-up” in last Saturday’s Financial Times², Lionel Barber notes that missing in three books “is a deeper analysis of why Trump was able to stage of one of the greatest comebacks in US political life.”  Here is my suggestion: In looking back at 2021-24, the one constant was that every time Donald Trump was impeached, sued, indicted, or even convicted, his approval ratings among Republican voters went up. 

In January of 2021, I hoped those who were outraged by what Donald Trump had done would ignore him as he left the presidency and not give him new things he could use as grievances, however appropriate it was to do them, to begin his comeback.  That is not what happened.

Democrats impeached him a second time, over the events of January 6, when they had every reason to know the Senate would not convict him. 

It took the Department of Justice so long to bring charges against him relating to January 6 and relating to his willful retention of classified documents³ that the cases couldn’t get anywhere on a timely basis.  A Georgia claim of racketeering was derailed when the local attorney bringing the charges was found to having an affair with the attorney she hired to handle the case.

The one time Donald Trump was convicted, and fined hundreds of millions of dollars, it was over misstating property values on an application for a loan which he repaid and which the lender didn’t complain about. 

I understand many people felt that doing these things was important to uphold the system, to treat all people equally under the law, and to hold even a President accountable.  But that missed two things.  First, if you are going to shoot a rampaging elephant, you have one shot, and you better make it count because if you don’t get him, he will get you.  Second, they failed to understand how what they were doing would look to the other side, to people who did not see things as they did. 

I do not know if what I hoped, that Donald Trump would be ignored as he left Washington a loser, would have worked.  I do know that what his opponents did, definitely did not work.
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¹ The three books were: Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson; Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Arnie Parnes; and Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple.
² Lionel Barber, “The great Biden cover-up”, Financial Times, May 25, 2025.
³ Of all the cases against Donald Trump, the classified documents case was, in my opinion, the strongest and the one that needed to be brought, given his unwillingness to cooperate and to return the documents.