If history is our guide, Trump’s chances of returning to the White House are extremely low

Donald Trump is all but certain to announce another run for president to reclaim the White House after his one term in office. He wouldn’t be the first former president to attempt such a political comeback.

If history is our guide, however, Trump’s chances of serving two nonconsecutive terms is extremely low. In fact, the record of success by former presidents winning a term after being out of office is limited to just one example in more than 200 years, even though others have tried to return to the presidency.

The closest parallel of what Trump is attempting to replicate comes from the career of Democrat Grover Cleveland, our 22nd and 24th president.

Cleveland was first elected in 1884. He won the Electoral College with 219 votes against his Republican opponent James G. Blaine’s 182 electoral votes. Cleveland’s victory, however, was masked by his razor-thin margin of victory in his home state of New York, which he won by just over 1,000 votes. Had Cleveland lost New York, Blaine would have won the presidency and Cleveland likely would have been just a footnote to history.

Just as Cleveland’s 1884 victory hinged on just a few votes in one state, in 2016, Trump’s margin over Hillary Clinton was because of small but significant victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He won these three states by a total of less than 78,000 votes, even though he lost the nationwide popular vote by close to 3 million votes.

In 1888, Cleveland ran for a second term — and in 2020, Trump ran for a second term. They both lost. Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote to Benjamin Harrison. Despite Trump’s unfounded protestations to the contrary, he lost the popular vote by more than 7 million votes and lost the Electoral College, relegating him to the status of former president.

By 1892, Cleveland was not content continuing to sit on the political sidelines, and so he made his comeback bid with another run at the presidency. The Democrats renominated him. In the general election, he took the keys to the White House back from Harrison with his wins in both the Electoral College and popular vote. Cleveland’s legacy was thus sealed as the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

With the 2024 presidential election just a little more than two years away, Trump has made no secret of his desire to run for president again. Unlike Cleveland, who won the popular vote in all three of his presidential bids, Trump has never won the popular vote.

While presidential elections give Republicans an edge in the Electoral College with sparsely populated conservative-leaning states, Trump’s chances of winning in 2024 are tempered by his tumultuous one term as president and by the multiple grand jury and other civil and criminal investigations into his actions before, during and after his presidency.

For Trump to win, he would need to draw votes from most Republicans and a significant number of independents. The 2024 political landscape is different than it was for Trump in 2016, when many decided to take a chance that a businessman might make a good president. He now has a documented track record of ignoring truth, undermining civility and shaking the foundations of our democracy. Knowing what we know, will voters be convinced to move him back into the White House?

Aside from whether Trump becomes the second president to win a nonconsecutive term, Cleveland and Trump lived in vastly different ethical worlds.

Cleveland, sometimes referred to as “Grover the Good,” was a man of principled integrity and honesty. When he was confronted with allegations that he had fathered a child outside of wedlock, he quickly admitted it.

By contrast, Trump’s business, political and personal affairs have been littered with thousands of lawsuits and questionable ethical practices — likely more than all other presidents combined.

Trump still maintains a strong base of enthusiasm within the Republican Party, but current polls indicate an overall weakening of Trump’s support. In one poll, 57 percent of voters thought Trump should not run again.

Trump’s legal exposures, from multiple investigations into the then-president’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, and the Justice Department’s review of classified and national intelligence documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago in the FBI’s search, all paint a perilous path for the former president — who could very well be indicted after the upcoming midterm elections.

Cleveland was not the only president to make a comeback bid to the presidency. Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Ulysses Grant and Theodore Roosevelt all attempted to reclaim the presidency after their terms of office. None of them were successful.

Will Trump replicate Cleveland’s return to the White House, or will his third national campaign for the presidency fall short like it has for others? Only time will tell, but the historical odds and the present-day legal threats facing Trump do not bode well for him to be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025.

Mike Purdy is a presidential historian, the author of the “Presidential Friendships: How They Changed History” and the founder of PresidentialHistory.com.