After watching Donald Trump ascend to power and crash back out, after all the feuds and drama, after all the tweets and endorsements, after all the tell-alls and investigations, we are back in 2015.

Seven years ago, Trump was a political neophyte not taken very seriously by most analysts as he embarked on remaking the Republican Party and demonstrating the power of his attention-grabbing, controversy-fueled mode of politics.

Now, he’s a former president and kingmaker that most in his party won’t dare cross and few, presumably, will underestimate again.

Yet, on the cusp of another potential run, some of the same questions and dynamics surround Trump as the first time around, including whether he will actually make the plunge or is just teasing, and how strong and enduring his apparent support is.

These doubts are perhaps another sign of wishful thinking on the part of people hoping Trump will fail to launch or go away, just like when he was about to descend the famous escalator. It is certainly the case, though, that Trump is now in his weakest position since 2015 or the first part of 2016 — when, of course, he won the nomination, although it wasn’t quite as inevitable as it came to look in retrospect.

First, there’s the threshold question of whether Trump will run. In 2015, there was much doubt that he would. He’d talked about it so much before. And would he really want to go through the paces of disclosing his finances? This time around, there are fewer doubters. Still, there’s a school of thought that believes he hasn’t truly decided whether to run and could pull up short if conditions don’t look propitious or he doesn’t feel up to it for some other reason.

Trump still draws big crowds. In 2015, when the Trump rally first became a thing, some commentators dismissed the size of his events. Candidates who were huge draws before — think Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012– didn’t amount to much in the end. In 2015 and 2016, these pundits thought people might be showing up for the entertainment, or to see what the fuss was about. Their attendance, that thinking went, didn’t mean they’d caucus or vote for Trump when push came to shove.

This, we now know, was flagrantly wrong. The Trump rallies showed a passion and commitment on the part of his supporters that no other candidate could come close to matching and was extremely important. As much as anything, the rallies were a metonymy for the larger Trump phenomenon.

Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally on Nov. 9, 2015, in Springfield, Ill.