WI: Donald Trump runs in 2004

[RepMR]

As it says on the tin, what happens Donald Trump runs for President in 2004 as he considered doing as a Democrat, his affiliation at the time?

 

[Marthabutt]

Probably loses worst then Kerry. His firebrand style only worked in 2016 due to the state of the world and the fact the GOP and Democratic Party were both facing internal problems.

Also,that's another thing to note. The DNC will not give him the nomination. If Dean failed,Trump will probably fail although it would still be interesting imo to see what impact he has on the race,if any.

 

[Just a Rube]

The Democratic Party is in a much better shape to resist his message. People of Color make up a huge chunk of the Democratic primary vote, and are unlikely to be favorable to Trump; e.g. Hispanics are not going to go in large numbers for someone who describes Mexican immigrants as "rapists." It's very difficult to win the Democratic nomination without at least some support among those groups.

In addition, 2004 was heavily shaped by the Iraq War and national security issues, which are Trump's weakest point; polls suggest even his supporters don't really trust Trump with nukes, and that will be far more in people's mind in 2004 (before the Great Recession, and with violence in Iraq regularly making the news) than it is now.

Even if Trump somehow did as well ITTL as he did for the Republicans this year, the Democrats also have super delegates (and this is pre-2008, so they actually have a ton of super delegates, more than this year), who could and would be used to deny him the nomination. This isn't a situation like 2008 or 2016 where the delegate leader was a candidate that the establishment could accept (even Bernie, if he had won the most delegates, would have been tolerable for the DNC, even if he wasn't their first choice); this is a situation where the super delegates would come down pretty decisively against what they see as a racist, sexist demagogue.

But the biggest problem is that The Apprentice didn't launch until January 2004; Trump hasn't really been visible enough to command instant popularity, and to the extent he has name recognition, much of it will be for his 1990s bankruptcies (the last time he was in the news in a big way), rather than as business guru and host of the popular reality TV show.

So essentially, he never gets anywhere. Now, Trump in 2012 (when he also toyed with running as a Republican) might be interesting.

 

[Ancien Regime]

2004 Trump would not run the same way as 2016 Trump. He'd be more like Perot than anything. He wouldn't get anywhere regardless, the economy wasn't doing too badly in 2004, and there wasn't the amount of working class unrest then. I COULD see him beating Hillary in 2008 if Obama doesn't try for the nom.

 

[Swiffness]

Resist his message? What message? This is a completely different time, a completely different era, a completely different party. And no Twitter.

Immigration was how Trump leveraged a hostile takeover of the GOP. The base had been essentially told to shut up on immigration for 30 years, they were starving for an Border Wall savior, and they were seeing Jeb Bush being groomed by the Establishment. Rest was history.

2004 Dem primary? That was about Iraq, Iraq, IRAQ, and The Levant. Dean was the anti-war champion, who lost in part because Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt, Wesley Clark were circling like sharks and pummeling him on his dovishness. If Trump is in there screaming GIVE PEACE A CHANCE too, I don't think he's getting close to a single primary win but he COULD draw enough fire away from Dean to give him the breathing room HE needs to win. And then we get the epic Iraq War debate the 2004 election should have been.

I mean, when Saddam Hussein was captured Dean said it didn't make us any safer and all the other candidates jumped down his throat like it was the biggest gaffe in the world. Smh.

Had Trump been a LOUD, unequivocal opponent of the Iraq War from the very beginning, led protests, and pounced on every successive failure in the press.......then and only then does he actually have a shot at winning the '04 nomination.

He'd better get on his knees and humbly beg The Black Vote's forgiveness for that Central Park 5 newspaper ad tho.

JOE TRIPPI, Campaign Manager: The other candidates were on conference calls every day to decide how to coordinate attacking us. That's been documented.

 

[Galba Otho Vitelius]

Trump in 2004 would basically have been Howard Dean. In fact this might have butterflied away Dean's own campaign. And it butterflies away The Apprentice, and the Trump 2016 campaign.

If Trump does well, at least as well as Dean did, and he decides to stay in politics, runs for either Governor of New York or Mayor of New York later on as a Democrat are possibilities.