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

Former President Donald Trump appeared to acknowledge for the first time last month 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 Sept. 22 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 on Nov. 5.

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."

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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. Given his prior efforts to sow doubts about elections, Trump on Election Night "could move quickly and announce he had won before a final result comes," said Katherine Fung at Newsweek. He will "most likely call the election early no matter what the results are showing," Bob Beatty, the chair of Washburn University's political science department, said to Newsweek.

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."

One of the most notable efforts has come in Georgia, where the state's Trump-aligned election board attempted to push through rules that would seemingly work in the former president's favor on election day. This includes a rule that would have "empowered county election board members to investigate discrepancies" and another that would have required poll workers in each precinct to hand-count ballots, said Reuters. The Georgia Supreme Court struck down the rules, but similar GOP efforts are expected in other battleground states.

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."