Trump Secured the 2024 GOP Nomination Three Years Ago Today

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : That same Pew survey -- conducted between January 8 and 12, 2021 -- showed that a solid majority of Republicans continued to support Trump, with 60 percent approving of his job performance and 37 percent disapproving.
46% : Despite its flaws, Luttig's legal theory was a politically convenient off-ramp that a majority of Senate Republicans, and McConnell himself, ultimately took on their way to acquitting Trump.
43% : ""I wasn't thinking a lot about four years from now," Young told The Dispatch when asked if he thought at the time that Trump would be the 2024 nominee.
43% : My state strongly supports President Trump too, that's another factor," Capito told The Dispatch when asked to reconcile her January 2021 comments with her 2024 endorsement.
42% : "McConnell's view that Trump had committed impeachable acts was reported by the New York Times on January 12, 2021.
41% : After winning the Iowa caucuses with 51 percent of the vote and the New Hampshire primary with 54 percent of the vote, Donald Trump is on track to steamroll his last remaining 2024 GOP challenger, Nikki Haley, in South Carolina and in the Super Tuesday states.
36% : While there's been some turnover since 2021, these lists of senators who have withheld their endorsement of Trump and who voted to advance a bill providing military aid to Ukraine against Trump's wishes provide a good starting point.
35% : This development -- alongside the doomed effort to disqualify Trump as a presidential candidate under the anti-insurrection provisions of the 14th Amendment -- make it clear that the closest the former president ever actually came to being denied the 2024 GOP nomination was three years ago today, February 13, 2021, when the Senate came 10 votes short of convicting him following his second impeachment trial.
35% : No, that's Washington, D.C."When Capito voted to acquit Trump in February 2021, did she realize he would likely be the 2024 nominee?
32% : The failure to get two-thirds of the Senate to convict Trump -- and a simple-majority of the Senate to subsequently disqualify him from holding public office again -- was not inevitable.
32% : It wasn't impossible to imagine a coalition of 17 Republican senators coming together in February 2021 to convict and disqualify Trump, but at least some of those senators would have needed to be willing to risk losing their Senate seats in primary elections.
31% : Rounds said he voted against conviction on the grounds that Trump was already out of office.
30% : It was a deliberate choice made by a number of Republican senators who believed Trump was responsible for the January 6 attack on the Capitol -- or at the very least, knew that he was guilty of dereliction of duty that day.
28% : Did he think there was a stronger argument that Trump was guilty of dereliction of duty?
27% : "Sen. Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia, who is up for re-election in 2026, is another example of a senator who would have risked her seat if she voted to convict Trump.
26% : Two other Republicans who voted to convict Trump in 2021 similarly declined to comment on the motives of GOP senators who voted to acquit.
26% : She represents a state that Trump carried by 39 points in 2020, but she squarely blamed him for the storming of the Capitol.
24% : Trump would already be out of office by the time the vote took place, but a conviction would mean he could be barred from running for office ever again."
23% : "GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the seven Republicans who did vote to convict Trump three years ago, told The Dispatch she "surely thought" at the time that a former president who had lost his re-election bid and been impeached twice "would kind of fade from the political headlines."
21% : We know the failure to convict and disqualify Trump was not inevitable because the Senate majority leader on January 6, Mitch McConnell, did not think it was inevitable in the days following the Capitol riot.
18% : But that same day, the conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that an impeachment trial conducted after Trump had left office would be unconstitutional.
18% : "Did Senate Republicans realize during Trump's second impeachment trial that Trump would likely be the 2024 nominee if he wasn't convicted and disqualified?
17% : Would it have changed her view if Trump had been impeached on January 7 and faced a Senate trial on January 8?
16% : The two remaining Republicans who voted to convict Trump -- Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine -- are up for re-election in 2026.
12% : Three of the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump -- Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Richard Burr of North Carolina, and Ben Sasse of Nebraska -- left office at the end of 2022, and Romney has announced he's retiring at the end of this year.
5% : A few GOP senators who voted to acquit Trump could have voted to convict without risking an electoral defeat: Rob Portman of Ohio, Richard Shelby of Alabama, and Roy Blunt of Missouri did not seek re-election in 2022.

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