Former U.S. president Donald Trump formally launched his third bid for the White House on Tuesday with a grievance-filled speech from his Mar-a-Lago club, setting the stage for a potentially ugly presidential campaign over the next two years.
Despite two impeachments, mounting electoral losses and declining support among Republicans, Trump pitched himself during a primetime address as the only candidate who can defeat President Joe Biden, who is expected to run for re-election in 2024.
“America’s comeback starts right now,” Trump told a room of cheering supporters.
His speech echoed the ones he delivered at rallies across the country over the past several months, claiming acts of aggression from North Korea, China and Russia, including the war in Ukraine, would not have happened under a second term.
He blamed Biden for record-high inflation and energy prices, as well as a surge of migrants across the southern border that he called “an invasion” — recalling his first campaign launch in 2015, when he likened Mexican immigrants to “rapists.”
“Two years ago we were a great nation, and soon we will be a great nation again,” Trump said.
At one point, in the middle of a litany of complaints about the state of the country, Trump claimed he and his movement did not want to be “critics” or “complainers.” He largely avoided his biggest complaint to date — that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite no supporting evidence — which nearly two years ago incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol and led to his second impeachment and multiple criminal investigations.
“I didn’t need this, I had a very nice and easy life,” he said later. “But we love our country and we want to protect it.”
Trump filed his declaration statement with the Federal Election Commission less than half an hour before his speech began.
Trump’s announcement was supposed to serve as the culmination of a Republican victory in last week’s midterms, which was highly expected to deliver the party a huge majority in the House of Representatives as well as control of the Senate.
That didn’t happen — Democrats are guaranteed to keep the Senate and Republicans are expected to make slim gains in the House — and many conservative figures in both politics and the media have blamed Trump for the party’s weak performance.
Several high-profile candidates for Senate and governor who earned Trump’s endorsement, including Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Arizona, were defeated. Lake and other candidates who lost their races had echoed Trump’s false claims of election fraud and similarly refused to say if they would accept their own defeats this year.
One of Trump’s endorsements, Georgian Senate candidate Herschel Walker, is headed to a runoff in December after finishing second to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock on Election Day. Aides and allies had urged Trump to wait until after that runoff to announce his plans, and expressed disappointment that Trump had rebuffed their pleas.
“Quite honestly it would have been better, I think, had he said, ‘I’m going to make a big announcement, but first I’m going to go to Georgia and make sure Herschel Walker wins that race,” former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee, a Trump ally, told conservative media outlet Newsmax Tuesday night.
“I can’t explain why he would choose right now before these elections are decided in Georgia.”
During his speech, Trump urged his supporters to vote for Walker, saying he would be “a great senator.”
Matthew Lebo, a political science professor at Western University, told Global News in an email that the timing of Trump’s timing “makes sense” regardless of the midterm results.
“He will be looking to for the free media that comes with a run and use the opportunities to go after his Republican competitors like Ron DeSantis,” he said.
DeSantis cruised to reelection as Florida’s governor last week and is now being urged by many in his party to run for president as well. Several polls suggest DeSantis could beat Trump in next year’s Republican primary, and the governor’s support has only grown after his midterm performance.
The gamble for Trump, Lebo said, is whether his 2016 strategy of picking off his primary competitors one by one will be effective again in a much different environment.
“It will be interesting to see how his attacks work or don’t when one competitor is attracting so much attention,” Lebo said. “That is, when the non-Trump vote is held by one competitor instead of six, can Trump bully them out of the race?”
Other Trump allies did not appear as concerned by DeSantis’ rise.
“President Trump, he excites people, he energizes our base, and he increases voter turnout,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told reporters in Washington on Tuesday, adding she doesn’t think her state’s Senate runoff will be impacted by Trump’s announcement.
“As far as people’s support for Ron DeSantis or anyone else that may announce they’re running, of course that’s their choice and they can do that. But president Trump remains the leader of the Republican Party, and (he) will be our nominee going into 2024. I don’t doubt that one bit.”
Trump faces multiple criminal investigations related to both the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and home. His company, the Trump Organization, is also facing a civil suit in New York over allegations of tax fraud that is currently being heard by a jury.
His presidential bid is seen by legal experts as an attempt to distance himself from those mounting probes, which he has called politically motivated even before his announcement.
A congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack is due to submit its final report later this year after holding a series of bombshell hearings that determined Trump was the “central player” in attempts to overturn his election loss, as well as fomenting the attack itself to disrupt Congress’ certification of Biden’s win.
Trump defied a subpoena from the committee that set a Monday deadline for the former president to testify and produce documents detailing his communications leading up to the attack.
During his announcement Tuesday, he called himself a “victim” and bemoaned the legal scrutiny he has faced since leaving the White House.
He concluded by repeating the same campaign slogan he has clung to since 2015: “We will make America great again.”
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