After Iowa, Trump is back to command the national psyche. He never actually left.

There was a time, not so long ago, when those weary and shaken by Donald J. Trump's presidency could almost convince themselves that the man was gone.

He was ostensibly a movement leader in exile, simmering in Florida; his shaky election lies were limited to private monologues and modest platforms. He no longer appeared on Fox News, the right's most powerful media outlet. His screeds on Truth Social didn't land with the force of their tweeted predecessors. Even as a presidential candidate for the past fourteen months, Mr. Trump often left the campaign trail to his rivals (who were usually fighting each other, rather than him), skipping debates and making only occasional appearances at public gatherings that did not belong to the duties of the president. Courts.

But with his landslide victory in Iowa codifying his dual hold on broad swaths of the Republican electorate, two conclusions were inescapable Tuesday morning.

Mr. Trump is back as the dominant figure in American political life — once again destined to be ubiquitous, and his intertwined legal and electoral dramas will overshadow the nation's ensuing year.

He never really left either.

After a term in the White House that often consumed the national psyche on an hour-by-hour basis — roiling his supporters and panicking his critics with every wayward post and norm-shattering impulse, culminating in the attack on the Capitol by a pro- Trump crowd on January 6, 2021 – some Trump-weary members of both parties and the political press seemed at times to wish him away, as if only the media oxygen had supported him for the past eight years.

Maybe he wouldn't really run again, some thought. Maybe he would punch himself, like a boxer. Perhaps the Republican Party, which has been punished in several elections since its 2016 victory, would find its way to someone else.

If Trump wins the New Hampshire primary next week, a march to a third nomination is almost certain. His opponents don't have earplugs effective enough to block that.

“Very few Democrats — apart from the deeply paranoid or intuitive — would have told you in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection that Trump would be the Republican nominee again in 2024,” said David Axelrod, a top adviser to the president. Barack Obama. “Once again, his wild genius for shaping a narrative of victimhood and leading his base was underestimated.”

Of course, Mr. Trump didn't have to speak much to keep his base engaged. And the more he, as a candidate, talked about the 91 criminal charges against him over the past year, the more Republicans returned to him.

Democrats are well aware that despite all the attention paid to Trump's indictments and his voluntary visits to some of his civil trials, his plans for another term and his inflammatory statements are far less visible to the general public. Some in the news media have been reluctant to focus their audiences on Mr. Trump, especially soon after he left office, for fear it would only amplify his lies about his election loss. Privately, some on the left lament that Twitter's suspension of Trump's account — after the Jan. 6 attack — only led to his removal from view.

Since 2016, both Republican and Democratic leaders have often agreed that it helps Democrats to have Mr. Trump at the political forefront. His failed re-election in 2020 became in large part a referendum on his runaway tenure. The 2022 midterm elections, a disappointment for Republicans, came after a series of congressional hearings into Mr. Trump's conduct on and around Jan. 6, a sort of rolling television series — with videos produced by a former television executive — devoted to what members of the House of Representatives. are crimes against democracy.

Mr. Axelrod noted that after a primary season that has seen his rivals pivot around him in top polls, Mr. Trump is preparing to face President Biden, “an opponent who is much less reluctant to attack.”

Democrats frankly hope that Trump's plentiful legal jeopardy will once again remind voters of the chaos that often follows him. Mr. Biden has signaled his plans to highlight Mr. Trump's efforts to undermine his loss in the 2020 election, invoking the attack on the Capitol and Mr. Trump's revisionist history about what happened.

But it is unclear whether Trump's trial on federal charges stemming from his efforts to cling to power, currently set to take place in March, will take place before Election Day as he questions the validity of the charges. And without a trial, the Biden team's ability to draw public attention to the events of January 6 is far from assured.

Polls have shown the extent to which Trump has mostly spoken to Republicans so far — and how they have shaped their thinking about the violence that followed his 2020 loss. A recent Washington Post survey from the University of Maryland found that far fewer Republicans blame Trump for the Jan. 6 attack than in 2021. More than two-thirds of Republicans said it's “time to move on.”

“The overwhelming majority of Americans are aware of Trump's legal troubles, and a significant number say a conviction would have some impact on their voting behavior,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “But without the spectacle of a pre-election trial and ruling, it is not clear that awareness is enough in an environment where the former president is polling stronger than his previous elections.”

As a candidate in Iowa, Trump was often noticeably left behind by his competitors. He showed little interest in changing or modulating. It wasn't close, at least not in Iowa, and his court appearances often created their own sense of movement despite having nothing to do with actual politics.

And so, on Monday, Mr. Trump — who loathes little more than being mocked, who delights in little more than being mocked — found confirmation of the early state that eluded him eight years ago, when he lost in Iowa (and wrongly insisted stated that the caucuses were stolen from him).

But even then he seemed to understand something that many others did not realize until much later. In a speech in New Hampshire in 2016, just before his first primary victory, he noted: “A lot of people have laughed at me over the years.”

“Now,” he said, “they don't laugh so much, I'll tell you that.”