What might be next for Trump if he loses the 2024 election?

Former President Donald Trump appears to have acknowledged for the first time that he might lose the 2024 presidential election. He also hinted that he would likely not attempt a fourth bid for the White House in 2028 if he were to lose, a rare look toward the future from a presidential candidate who has long been claiming he will cruise to victory this November.

"No, I don't. No, I don't. I think that will be, that will be it. I don't see that at all," Trump said during a Sunday interview with Sinclair Broadcast Group when asked if he would run for president in 2028. The former president would be 82 that year, which is why it would seem unlikely that he would run for the highest office again. But if Trump does not regain the White House, there is something else waiting for him: a continued barrage of legal troubles that are unlikely to go away if he loses to Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

What did the commentators say?

There is a chance that "if Trump loses, he backtracks" from his 2028 claim, reporter and political analyst Ron Brownstein said at CNN. It is "in fact, unlikely" Trump would run in 2028, but "he's going to want to keep open the possibility that he will do so to keep the Republican Party in line, particularly because if he loses, the risk of these criminal trials going forward obviously continues." The former president is "going to want to keep Republicans under the threat of another Trump candidacy."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But whether he keeps to his word or not, Trump's insistence is "notable both because Trump seemed to rule out a fourth bid for the White House and because he rarely admits the possibility he could legitimately lose an election," said The Associated Press. The former president "normally insists that could only happen if there were widespread cheating, a false allegation he made in 2020 and he's preemptively made again during his 2024 presidential campaign."

This is also "not the first time Mr. Trump has made such a comment," said Maggie Astor at The New York Times, as he pledged in 2020 that he wouldn't run again if he lost to Joe Biden. But the "question of whether Mr. Trump would try again in four years if he lost is a step ahead of a more immediate matter: whether he would accept a loss this year to begin with."

Despite what he has said, Trump's claims "should always be taken with a grain of salt, and his decision about 2028 is a particularly hard one to fact-check," said Rachel Treisman at NPR. However, his 2028 stance "aligns with comments Trump has made — including during the first debate — suggesting he wouldn't have entered the race if not for President Biden," and it also "squares with voters' concerns and Trump's criticisms about Biden's age — which are now boomeranging right back at him."

What next?

In the immediate aftermath of a potential Trump loss, there will likely be efforts by the former president to sow doubts about the election. Both Democrats and the GOP are "engaged in a sprawling legal fight over the 2024 election through a series of court disputes that could even run past Nov. 5 if results are close," said the AP. Republicans have already "filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied."

Trump himself has also claimed that he could only lose in November as a result of widespread voter fraud, which remains unsubstantiated. Trump and his allies have "combined their two principal obsessions — immigration and election 'integrity' — to conjure the specter of immigrants crossing the border to elect Kamala Harris president," said The New Yorker.

If Trump does lose, though, his legal issues would "keep moving forward as they have been, proceeding to trial without the ex-president's office posing any impediment," said Forbes. Even if Trump were to win the election, it wouldn't "erase his conviction in New York state court for falsifying business records, but it does make it likely any sentence wouldn't be carried out until after he leaves office."