Mark Halperin

But what I do know is that after he lost and the assumption was he would not be back, that he was done politically.

That there was kind of a sigh of relief in blue America that said, OK, Hillary Clinton screwed that up.

He barely won the first time he didn't win the popular vote.

But now everybody's seen who he is and what he's like, and he'll never be back again.

The Republicans won't nominate him.

And if they do, we'll be so lucky as a Democratic Party to have Trump to run against.

And of course.

They then spent the intervening period trying to send him to prison, trying to keep him off the ballot, trying to repudiate everything he'd done as president, not giving him credit for things he'd done positive.

And the Democratic Party went crazy woke.

The reaction to Trump being president was not to say, well, let's do some soul searching and see where the party was off track in 2016 and maybe try to maybe move more to the center.

No, the reaction was, no, let's move further to the left.

And Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

During the four years Donald Trump were out, moved to the left, obviously on immigration, moved to the left on a lot of cultural things, a lot of things having to do with DEI, with corporations, with titles that affected universities in various ways.

All of this opened the door for Donald Trump to come back.

And as I watched the 2024 election,

I had a feeling even more intense than I did in 2016 because 2016 was, even for me, someone who thought Trump could win, a surprise.

I didn't think for sure he would by any means.

2024, in not just looking at the polling data, but in thinking about the arc of the two parties and of Trump's leadership and of Joe Biden and the con that he and his team tried to put on America about his mental decline and then Kamala Harris and her weaknesses as a candidate, I went into election season, the final days, more confident about Trump's chances than I had been in 2016.

And I was concerned because, again, this was not the fluke of 2016 where Trump gets elected almost in a lark, almost accidentally.

And because of so many mistakes made by Hillary Clinton and so many actions by people like Assange and Comey and her own husband that produced a confluence that allowed Trump to win.