By Joel Mathis, The Week

For me, 2021 will always be the year Donald Trump didn’t go away.

I had thought — and predicted — that shorn of office and social media access, the former president would be forced to give up the spotlight. And it’s true that Trump is not as ubiquitous in our lives as he was a year ago: There are no more hour-long afternoon battles with the press, no more waking up and grabbing your phone to check out his latest inevitable provocation on Twitter. It’s been a genuine relief not to think about Donald Trump all the time.

But he’s still out there, lurking. Even if the spotlight no longer shines incessantly on Trump, it’s never far away.

He sits for friendly interviews with Fox News on a regular basis. He still has the power to chase Republican members of Congress out of office. States that he won in 2020 are conducting audits of their elections at his behest. And he remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024. We can’t entirely turn our eyes from Trump, because he still matters.

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