In a rambling speech, former President Donald J. Trump said he would seek another term, dismissing Republican concerns that he was to blame for the party's weak midterm showing.
Trump, ignoring his midterm decision, declared the 2024 election.
PALM BEACH, Florida — Donald J. Trump, whose historically divisive presidency rattled the pillars of the country's democratic institutions, declared Tuesday night his intention to seek the White House again in 2024, ignoring calls from Republicans warning of his continued influence on the party was largely to blame for its weaker-than-expected performance in the midterm elections.
His initial extraordinary announcement was motivated in part by calculations that a formal nomination could help protect him from multiple investigations into his attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, which led to a deadly mob attack by supporters in the Capitol on January 11. 6, 2021.
The decision, which was taken while votes were still being counted in the congressional contests that will determine the balance of power in the House, confronts a tired and polarized nation - its social fabric that has been stressed by the forces unleashed and strengthened by the Trump era - with a reboot of the non-stop political reality show. which the Biden presidency had promised to cancel.
Trump's haste to become a candidate again carries political risks and financial burdens, and some advisers have been pushing him to delay. But he has been eager to announce the campaign since this summer, nearly did at a rally last week on election night and told several advisers he was worried another delay would signal weakness.
The twice impeached former president's view, according to friends and advisers, is that a formal White House bid would strengthen his claim that the various state and federal investigations he has faced were all politically motivated.
Indeed, he hopes the nomination can provide a respite for prosecutors who may be considering criminal charges, especially in light of the Justice Department's investigation of highly sensitive documents Trump held at his private club Mar-a-Lago in Florida, according to friends and advisers, who insist not mentioned by name to discuss private conversations.
At Mar-a-Lago, the site of the possible crime, Trump on Tuesday declared his determination to reclaim the presidency.
"We will make America rich again," he concluded. “We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. We will make America great again. And we will make America great again.”
In his rambling hour-long speech, Trump gave an exaggerated description of his accomplishments before announcing his candidacy. He quickly returned to his typical rallies, full of false statements, inflammatory discussions about immigration and crime, and nods to right-wing culture war issues.
Notably, he does not dwell on his loss in the 2020 election, although he has called for the abolition of all early voting machines, absentee voting and electronic voting. "Only ballot papers," he said.
And he has repeatedly voiced complaints about the ongoing investigations against him and his family, denouncing the F.B.I. searched his property to retrieve documents, among other questions. "I am a victim," Trump told the crowd bluntly.
Although the former president's dominance in Republican Party politics had led to three consecutive disappointing elections for the party, he immediately claimed the mantle of G.O.P. the forefront, thanks to the loyal following of millions of supporters who have repeatedly proved their loyalty to him.
One reason for the rush was to dull the momentum building behind Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose unexpected re-election victory last week shocked many in the party. Mr. DeSantis is already the preferred presidential candidate among a large number of Republican donors and elected officials who have grown weary of Mr. Trump's control, constant controversy and his endless tirades about 2020.
However, Trump's rush to announce the bid also carries the risk of backlash. Conservative news outlets, including Fox News and others belonging to Murdoch's empire, have opposed it. The New York Post mocked him on its cover last week as "Trumpty Dumpty", a day after assuming Mr. A much younger DeSantis as "DeFuture". And a Wall Street Journal editorial on Monday decried him as “the man most likely to produce the G.O.P. loss and total power for progressive left.
Several advisers privately warned against the announcement, saying that "Trump fatigue" had contributed to a losing 2020, and that voters needed to rest after their contentious 2022 election season. Over the weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told several people that he had visited Trump in Florida and asked that he delay the announcement.
More broadly, Trump's insistence on another campaign has sparked a heated debate among Republicans about whether the party can thrive with him as leader — and, if not, how that might lead to a divorce. Many party leaders believe last week's failure demonstrates the folly of Trump's obsession with his false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election.
His self-picked candidate lost in close competition across the country, including a crushing blow in Pennsylvania, where Democrats flipped a Senate seat and helped ensure that Republicans would remain in the minority for the next two years. (A runoff election in Georgia on Dec. 6 could give the Democrats a 51st seat. It remains unclear whether Herschel Walker, the former football star who was urged by Mr. Trump to run as a Republican, would want Mr. Trump to campaign with him.)
Mr Trump backed five candidates in the country's most competitive House election, according to a ranking by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. All five lost.
He was also heavily embroiled in a contest to determine who would run the electoral apparatus in a critical state before the 2024 presidential election. The result: Any election deniers who attempted to become top election officials in the battleground state were defeated.
Mr. Trump and his team are racing to do damage control and project power ahead of Tuesday. They rallied support from Republican leaders and invited the 168-member Republican National Committee to the Mar-a-Lago event, although many were reluctant to attend due to party rules requiring neutrality in the main contest.
But he barely has a campaign team. No campaign manager or communications director was chosen, and many of the arrangements for Tuesday were made by Jason Miller, a longtime adviser who is now chief executive of Gettr, a social media company.
The former president is also now legally barred from working with Tony Fabrizio, his veteran pollster, and Taylor Budowich, a key adviser for much of the last year. Both will work for Mr. Super PAC. Trump; under campaign finance laws, they cannot coordinate with active candidates.
Trump's new presidential campaign is about to kick off as he faces two Justice Department investigations: one into sensitive documents kept at Mar-a-Lago, and another into his actions and those taken by his allies and supporters to keep him in power beyond 2020. . defeat.
Additionally, prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., have formed a grand jury to investigate Trump and his team's attempts to overturn the 2020 results in Georgia. Congressional committees have spent months gathering information and testimony about his conduct in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A civil investigation into his family's business, the Trump Organization, led by New York attorney general Letitia James, resulted in a lawsuit that ensnared Mr. . Trump. And Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is suing Mr. Trump's company for tax fraud charges in a trial that is currently underway in Manhattan.
Trump's candidacy could also cut off the flow of Republican money that he uses to pay his personal legal bills. Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said the committee would stop paying Mr. Trump once he became a candidate.
In recent history, no non-incumbent presidential candidate has successfully opened a White House bid long before the election. But Trump's penchant for the unconventional has defined his political style, and it fueled his successful campaign as a first-time candidate in 2016.Most presidential candidates are reluctant to announce campaigns this early due to the strict $2,900 per person donation limit during the primaries. For Mr Trump, that means he can appeal to his biggest donors just once, until elections start in 2024, to help his candidacy directly.
Trump's announcement also means he is now ineligible to use any of the roughly $100 million spread across three different political accounts, starting in late October, to support his direct presidential election.
However, the group can provide indirect support, such as TV commercials or political events that highlight issues aligned with the former president's agenda.
But Mr. Trump continues to raise surprising amounts of cash from small donations online, a sign of his broad grassroots support and a major data point for his advisers who remain indifferent about paying for his extended presidential campaign.
Another potential challenge for Trump is whether he can articulate exactly why he wants to be president. His team identified that as a significant reason he lost his re-election bid.
Mr. Trump laid out a proposal that echoes one he has been talking about for a long time: focus on the economy and border security. But he also suggested a new law that would allow the death penalty for drug dealers, a draconian suggestion that sharply contradicts the criminal justice improvement bill that Trump signed as president. He has repeatedly expressed regret about the law, and the Republican base is generally not in favor of it.
As president, Trump has his administration's continued policies aimed at limiting immigration, confronting China, and boosting the economy—all issues that supported his unexpected election in 2016. He's enjoyed a historic drop in the unemployment rate, soaring stock market returns, increased home income earnings. average ladder and decreased poverty during his first three years in the White House.
He spent his final year in office entangled in the coronavirus pandemic and in a campaign that was largely a referendum on his response to the contagion.
He has repeatedly downplayed the severity of a disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and crippled the US economy, even as his administration backed the rapid development of a vaccine which paid off after he left office.
He has also been impeached twice, doubling the number of impeachment presidents in the nation's history.
House Democrats formally called for his removal from office after he pressured Ukraine in 2019 to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., making Trump the third president to be impeached.
He was indicted for an unprecedented second time on charges that he instigated the January 6 attacks. In both cases, Trump was acquitted in the Senate because Democrats failed to persuade enough Republicans to vote for punishment.
Only once in US history has a president won a second term on the second try. It happened in 1892 when Grover Cleveland, a New York Democrat who had been ousted from the White House four years earlier by Benjamin Harrison, an Indiana Republican, returned the favor in a rematch.
Of nine other presidents who were deposed after one term, only one ever ran again: Martin Van Buren, who lost the Democratic nomination in 1844 and failed to run four years later as the Free Soil Party's nominee. This article was written by EDUKASI CAMPUS.