By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Hunches usually aren’t very reliable barometers of political trends and Lord knows my own hunches have let me down a time or three.

However, I am going to toss one out there for you to ponder. It is that Donald John Trump will not run for president in 2024.

He stood before the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd over the weekend and said he won’t form a third political party. Trump wants to remain active in GOP politics. They took a straw poll of CPAC attendees and Trump finished first with 55 percent of those attending who said they wanted him to be the Republican Party presidential nominee in ’24.

The ex-president no doubt took all of that to heart. He might run again for the office he lost bigly after a single term to Joe Biden.

But … why? How? To what end?

Trump is facing multiple crises unrelated to politics. They are totally related to whether he will face criminal charges regarding his business “empire.” How in the name of rational thought does someone run for president if he is indicted by a grand jury for, let’s see, campaign finance violations? Or income tax fraud?

How does even someone as slippery as Donald Trump do that?

Trump once boasted that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” A lot of us laughed when he said it in 2016. His acquittal in the Senate trial of inciting an insurrection wiped that smile off my face.

None of that means he will be able to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Yeah, he’s got that faithful base. Is it sufficient to carry him to victory in the primary with the potential crises exploding all around him?

That hunch of mine says, um, “no.”

I just hope it doesn’t let me down again.