Well, it’s happened before.

kagis

https://www.thoughtco.com/losing-presidential-candidates-nominated-again-3368135

Here’s a list. For nine candidates before (this article predates Trump’s third primary victory, so only lists eight) a Presidential candidate has lost in the general election and made it to a second general election. Five of those times, the candidate managed to win in the general election.

• Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, lost to Biden in 2020, and defeated Harris in 2024.

• Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960, but defeated Humphrey in 1968.

• Stevenson lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and lost to Eisenhower again in 1956.

• Dewey lost to FDR in 1944 and lost to Truman in 1948.

• Bryan lost to McKinley in 1896, to McKinley again in 1900, and to Taft in 1908.

• Clay lost to John Quincy Adams in 1824, to Jackson in 1832, and to Polk in 1832.

• Harrison lost to Van Buren in 1836, but defeated him in 1840.

• Jackson lost to John Quincy Adams in 1824, and then defeated him in 1828 and defeated Clay in 1832.

• Jefferson lost to Adams in 1796, but defeated him in 1800.

Goes to whatever the top result is without an extra click.

I would be very surprised if he paid anything from his own pocket for it.

The article says that he’s trying to get donations for a larger one, so he definitely isn’t getting government funds for that.

I mean, it’s a desk paperweight. He’s wealthy. This is not a ton of money.

I’m guessing that he had it done himself and that he owns it and isn’t gonna leave it behind.

Once again, Donny-Dumbfuck doesn’t understand how the business world works.

He knows how this works.

However, some of his audience in the US does not, and he’s exploiting that ignorance.

What he’s doing is just creating this fictional narrative where he’s always being seen as fighting against some enemy that’s keeping the US from being exactly the way his target audience wants it to be. It’s not Trump’s fault. He’s pushing as hard as possible to make everything perfect. It’s <some other figure>.

A couple of years back, when Venezuela didn’t pay some Portuguese company for ham, they stopped shipping ham until they got paid. Maduro went out and accused Portugal of attacking Venezuela.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/28/americas/venezuela-portugal-christmas-sabotage/index.html

President Nicolas Maduro has accused Portugal of being behind a pork shortage that left thousands of Venezuela’s poor without their traditional Christmas dinner and sparked a fresh round of angry street protests.

On Wednesday Maduro announced he had been unable to distribute thousands of pork hind legs to the poorest neighborhoods in the country – as he had promised earlier in the month. And he put the blame squarely on Portugal.

“What happened to the pork?” Maduro asked during a Wednesday televised address. “They sabotaged us. I can name a country: Portugal.”

Like many in Latin America, Venezuelans typically eat pork legs, known locally as pernil de cerdo, during the Christmas holidays. Maduro had promised to distribute the pork as part of the monthly subsidized food ration for low-income families.

“It was all set, because we had bought all the pork there was in Venezuela, we bought it all. So we had to import, and so I gave the order and I signed the payments. But they went after the bank accounts, they went after the two giant ships that were coming. They have sabotaged us,” said Maduro.

It’s not unusual for the Venezuelan government to blame other countries, including the United States, for its crippling economic woes.

Every problem is someone else’s fault, not Maduro’s, who is fighting his very hardest for the public. Maybe it’s the CIA. Maybe it’s reactionaries. But it most certainly is someone else. Every problem just requires a new story about how someone is countering the Supreme Leader’s effort, else everything would be perfect.

We just aren’t used to seeing this kind of stuff from a US President. Trump, however, is doing the same sort of nonsense.

Consider some of the following recent Trump stuff:

• Trump is considering suspending habeas corpus. The Trump administration is intentionally exploiting confusion over the metaphorical word “invasion” and the legal term. So then he’s going to probably go declare suspension of habeas corpus, which he can’t do short of someone invading, and then a judge is going to shoot it down, and the Trump will go tell his base that the judges are chaining him down, even though he had every right to do this, and if it weren’t for radical leftist judges, there would be no illegal immigrants.

• Trump warns U.S. carmakers not to take advantage of tariffs by hiking prices on consumers. Trump knows perfectly well that companies hit by tariffs are going to pass that on into price increases for consumers. But some people in the US don’t, so by publicly standing up and demanding this, he can exploit that ignorance, show himself as standing up for consumers and random companies being the bad guy.

The political strategy is to always pass the buck off to someone else, and try to get as many people as possible to burn their own credibility supporting his false claims so that he doesn’t run out of credibility.