Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him @DeanObeidallah. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Donald Trump just won his first election in six years — well, sort of. On Saturday, billionaire Elon Musk announced the results of a poll posted on his recently acquired Twitter that asked users if Trump should be reinstated on the platform. Twitter’s former management had permanently suspended Trump from the platform shortly after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, explaining in a statement at the time that it was “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” by Trump via his tweets.
One day after asking Twitter users for their views, Musk revealed the news with his tweet: “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated.” But not before Trump had taken to his own social media platform, Truth Social, where he attached the poll and urged supporters “to vote now with positivity.” After Trump’s alleged victory, he pretended not to care, explaining he would be staying on Truth Social.
I say the “alleged” win by Trump given concerns raised by some about the validity of the results — such as New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway, who sarcastically tweeted while the voting was taking place: “It would be impossible for the GRU or any other bot farm to influence this poll. Impossible.” (The GRU is known as the “attack dog” of Russia’s intelligence services.)
Call us Twitter “poll deniers,” but it’s challenging to believe it was a full and fair election. I mean, how can we trust the results without in-person voting and paper ballots, as Trump has claimed are required to ensure elections are secure?
But assuming he won, Trump should savor it because it was his first victory since 2016 — and more importantly, possibly his last. Trump’s only election win came in the 2016 presidential race. Granted, winning the presidency is a big deal. But since then, it’s been nothing but losing for the guy who promised during the 2016 campaign that there would be so many wins with him as President that people would “get tired of winning.”
Fast-forward to Friday when Mike Pompeo — Trump’s former secretary of state and a possible 2024 GOP presidential candidate — needled Trump over that very line ahead of an appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition. “We were told we’d get tired of winning. But I’m tired of losing,” Pompeo tweeted. “And so are most Republicans.”
Pompeo is right. Trump has brought nothing but a dumpster full of losses to the GOP. First, the Republicans lost the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms. Then, there was his loss in 2020 to President Joe Biden — which led to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and incendiary remarks by Trump using the very Twitter platform that Musk just allowed him back on. (Trump has never publicly accepted any responsibility for the attack.)
Of course, there was the US Senate runoff in Georgia on January 5, 2021, where Democrats pulled a major upset by winning two races and thereby took control of the Senate for the first time since 2014.
That takes us to this year’s midterm debacle that saw every single election-denying candidate Trump backed for statewide office in battleground states losing. These losses weren’t happenstance. Voters from Pennsylvania to Arizona sent a loud message that they rejected Trump’s election-lying candidates.
The list of Team Trump losers even included Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, known for her full embrace of the former President’s election lies as well as her combative way with the media — which was noteworthy given that she had been a longtime local TV news anchor. But when on Team Trump you are required to mimic the supreme leader.
Worse for Trump is that his future is looking just as bad. His presidential announcement last week received vocal criticism from a wide range of conservative media outlets.
But it was Trump’s one-time backer Rupert Murdoch whose New York Post won the award for the most brutal/comedic trolling of Trump. First, the paper buried Trump’s presidential announcement on Page 26 of the paper with headline, “Been there, Don that.” Then it featured an article mocking Trump with lines such as, “With just 720 days to go before the next election, a Florida retiree made the surprise announcement that he was running for president.”
And it gets uglier for Trump from there. A Marist poll released Friday asked Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters who would be the best candidate to serve as the GOP presidential nominee in 2024. A paltry 35% said Trump would be that person. Add to that, 60% of Republican-leaning independent voters thought a candidate other than Trump would be a more viable option for the party in 2024. Oh, that has to hurt the thin-skinned, twice-impeached Trump.
Obviously, there’s a long way to go to the first GOP presidential primaries in 2024, let alone the November 2024 election. But the way it looks, Trump should bask in the glow of winning the Twitter poll, given that it might just be his last “election” victory.
