A Shocking Number of Republicans Think Trump Is Magically Going to Become President Again

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Former President Donald Trump, despite his very best efforts, left office in January. He is now a private citizen, and without running for office again, there is no mechanism for him to resume being president without winning an election. 

But that’s not what nearly 30 percent of Republican voters believe, apparently.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll taken in early June found that 28 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning respondents thought it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that Trump will be reinstated as president this year. Among Democrats, 12 percent thought it was at least somewhat likely Trump would be reinstated.. 

And somewhat surprisingly, younger people tended to believe Trump will be reinstated as president at higher rates than their older counterparts. Around 27 percent of Gen Zers and 32 percent of millennials think it’s at least somewhat likely he’ll be president again this year as opposed to just 11 percent of Boomers. 

Just to reiterate, Donald Trump currently occupies the same spot in the line of succession that I do. He will not be reinstated as president, because that is not a real thing that can happen without an actual coup taking place. 

The theory that Trump is going to MacGyver his way back into the presidency, however, has its roots in QAnon, an online conspiracy theory movement, believed Trump would never leave the White House. When he did, they thought, he would be reinstated on March 4, which did not happen. And in recent weeks, the spurious “audit” in Arizona’s Maricopa County has given more fuel to obsessives who believe the election was stolen from Trump, and similar efforts have been launched in cities, towns, and counties around the country.

At a QAnon conference in Dallas last month, former national security adviser Michae

l Flynn said there was “no reason” a military coup such as the one in Myanmar earlier this year shouldn't happen in the U.S. 

And earlier this month, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote on Twitter that Trump himself is telling people that he’ll be reinstated by August.

But despite the eye-popping “reinstatement” numbers from Republican voters, the poll also found that more than half of Americans overall support Trump’s two-year ban from Facebook announced last week—which, along with bans from other social media sites like Twitter, is limiting his ability to boost conspiracies somewhat.  

Last week, the “blog” Trump launched on his website to send out Twitter-style missives was shut down after less than a month, with senior aide Jason Miller telling CNBC that it “will not be returning.”