President Trump’s legal team and his supporters on Capitol Hill are turning their attention to a potential, though still unlikely, scenario should the Senate surprise the public with a conviction on the two impeachment articles he faces.

The new focus is keeping him on 2020 primary and general-election ballots so that he can return to office if he’s given the boot — or impeached again this year, as some House Democrats are predicting.

While there is no precedent, officials are conferring with constitutional scholars to determine the president’s ballot rights, because one thing is clear, a close political Trump ally said: “He’s going to run no matter what happens.”

In an interview, Republican Sen. Rand Paul said the potential ballot confusion was “not emphasized enough,” and he believed that it was one of the key reasons Democrats have pushed impeachment to the cliff.

Their goal, he said, was not protecting democracy, but ruining the GOP’s election chances.

“Do you think [Democratic impeachment manager] Adam Schiff is just doing this because he’s such a stand-up citizen? Or do you think he cares about damaging people of the opposite political party?” Paul asked.

“Right now, Trump is the presumptive nominee. The thing is, if convicted, he wouldn’t be allowed to run. This isn’t about the 2016 election. It’s not about potential malfeasance in office. It’s about taking him off the ballot and there being chaos on the other side,” he added.

The rules, however, aren’t clear on the process. If convicted, Trump loses his job. But some experts said that it was up to the Senate to level other punishments, including barring him from getting elected president after that.

Trump’s supporters have been circulating a report from PolitiFact that indicated he could run so long as he wasn’t erased from the ballots.

In an analysis for the Trump-supporting Heritage Foundation, University of North Carolina constitutional law professor Michael Gerhardt referred to judicial impeachments and suggested that the Senate could vote on the ballot question.

But since there is no model, the current Senate would have to pave the way. He wrote, “The debates over censure, like those over the other questions about the appropriate sanctions the Senate may impose for presidential misconduct, are likely to persist until historical practice resolves the matter.”

Paul seemed convinced that if Trump is convicted, removal from the ballot will come next no matter what the president’s supporters want.

“He’s going to be removed from the ballot. Can you imagine the chaos? If he’s kicked out of the presidency, he’s removed from the ballot. We would have had most of our primaries by the time this happens,” the senator said.

“If you get through March before this happens, if we do an investigation, and then all of a sudden, they remove him, and he can’t be on the ballot, [Democrats] have completely destroyed the 2020 election for the other party. Which is the ultimate irony of this whole thing. They’re using the government, they’re using the government to go after political enemies,” Paul added.

He is pushing for more attention to the issue by Trump’s team because he fears that the president’s supporters do not see the goal of the Democrats.

“This is the irony. They want to impute what his motives are, and so the thing is that they say his motives are political. Well, are not their motives for impeachment political?” the senator said.

“Not one person on the Left in the media is questioning at all the motives of Adam Schiff, but they are all questioning the president’s motives,” he said, then offered a reason for the double standard. “They hate the president so much.”

