Trump loses: What you can expect the former president to do in retirement

‘I had had such a beautiful life before I did this’

Would he miss it? He claims not.

Would we see him again? Maybe, maybe not.

What would he do? Play golf, nurse his wounds and plot another run in 2024? Perhaps - or perhaps not.

“Oh, I had had such a beautiful life before I did this,” Donald Trump said in a speech this summer to staff at the Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant in Clyde, Ohio.

It was always assumed Mr Trump might return to the world of business or broadcasting when he was done with politics, unless - as some critics hoped and wished - he was convicted of some some sort of crime and sent to jail. But what about if Mr Trump were not so much done with politics, but politics were done with him?

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In recents days, in the strange, unsatisfactory period between the dramas of election night and the sluggish, drawn-out aftermath when the candidates, and the people of the world, are waiting for a result, focus has turned to what a post-presidential life might look life for Donald Trump, especially as the advantage appears to currently lie with his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.

On Thursday, the New York Times said that discussions Mr Trump previously had about a possible television channel had continued in 2020. 

“There’s no question that he is one of the greatest polarising political figures of modern history,” Tony Fabrizio, one of Mr Trump’s pollsters told the newspaper. “His supporters adore him and his opponents revile him. There is no middle ground on Donald Trump.”

When The Independent spoke recently to people who lived close to the president in Palm Beach County, Florida, there was a general agreement he would go back to being a businessman, his contacts book ever more full, were he to lose to Mr Biden.

Nobody thought the president would feel so embarrassed by such a loss that he would feel the need to leave the country. 

Indeed, there was also agreement that with its lower taxes and far more comfortable winters, the president would stay in Florida, where he is now officially a resident, rather than return to New York.

“I think he will stay right here. He’s not going anywhere,” said 72-year-old Donna Cash, who had moved to Florida a few years ago from the east coast, and who was a supporter of the president. “He’ll go back to making money.”

Could the president remain in politics, somehow continuing to be the de facto head of the Republican Party, and preparing the way for a presidential run by either his daughter, Ivanka, or his eldest son Donald Trump Jr, in 2024?

Is it possible the president would make another bid the presidency himself, either as the candidate of the GOP, or as an independent?

Huge numbers of people who attend the president’s rallies express considerably more devotion to him and his “outsider” businessman’s so-called revolution than they do the Republican Party itself.

On Monday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the president’s final rally for the 2020 campaign, one supporter Jason Sist, said: “He is not bought and sold.”

Right up to the end, the Trump campaign remained adamant the president had a long career ahead of him, starting with another four years as president,

On Thursday, adviser Jason Miller, said the campaign was setting up a website to allow people to monitor what it was doing in different states in terms of legal challenges. 

“Donald Trump is alive and well,” said Mr Miller.