WASHINGTON—Former President donald trump announced Tuesday night that he is running for president in 2024, presenting an aggressively conservative agenda that includes executing those convicted of selling drugs.
The campaign will be Trump’s third bid for president, but his first attempt to win votes since his refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election and his frantic efforts to retain power led to the deadly attack on the Capitol. American on January 6, 2021. .
“We are a failing nation. We are a failing nation for millions of Americans,” Trump said in a speech at his private club in Florida, attacking President Joe Biden’s record in his first two years in office. power. “I’ll make sure Joe Biden doesn’t get four more years.”
Trump filed documents with the Federal Election Commission earlier Tuesday evening in which he declared himself a candidate for president and created a new campaign committee.
“This campaign will be about problems, vision and success, and we won’t stop, we won’t give up until we achieve the highest goals and make our country greater than it is. ever was,” Trump said.
Trump barely mentioned the 2020 presidential race, nor did he mention his two separate impeachment trials, the first for leveraging US foreign aid to extort Ukraine from investigating the Biden family, and the second for his role in the Jan. 6 attack. on the Capitol.
Instead of dwelling on his tenure, Trump’s speech on Tuesday echoed his 2016 campaign speeches in many ways, painting a dystopian picture of America as a failed nation ravaged by violent crime for ” a time of pain, hardship, anxiety and despair”.
Trump said the “greatest threat to our civilization” was what he called the weaponization of the Justice Department and the FBI, which is now investigating his handling of classified documents and his role in a massive effort to quash the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.
He called for a “top-down review and cleanup of the rot and corruption of Washington, DC”
Trump also said he would demand a sweeping new list of voter restrictions, including requiring only paper ballots, allowing voters only one day to vote, requiring photo ID to vote and “all votes counted on election night”.
“I’m going to do this job,” he said. “It’s a very personal job for me. I take it very personally.”
However, voting in the United States is run by the states, not the federal government. Even if Trump were president and had the support of a Republican Congress, he couldn’t change the way states run elections.
During the 2022 election cycle, Trump promoted and donated to a group of candidates turning down the 2020 election in battleground states who were running for positions overseeing their states’ elections. Races were held in Michigan, Arizona, Minnesota and Nevada, and each of Trump’s candidates lost.
Launching his campaign now, just a week after Republicans lost key midterm races, Trump was also rejecting the advice of current and former advisers who had warned him against declaring himself a candidate for president so soon after a defeat for his party.
Trump’s filing with the FEC created the Donald J. Trump for president 2024 and officially kicked off the 2024 Republican presidential primary, a contest where the dynamics changed dramatically last week.
Heading into last Tuesday, Trump, 76, was the undisputed favorite in his party’s nominating contest, with polls showing support for the former president among Republican voters with an average of more than 20 percentage points over his closest rival, Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis.
But that was before DeSantis won reelection by an extraordinary 19-point margin, electrifying Republicans across the country and offering the party a glimmer of hope on a day when Democrats won most major Senate and presidential races. governors.
Now some of YouGov’s early post-election polls show DeSantis take the lead on Trump.
The Florida governor reportedly met with donors and began mounting his own presidential campaign to challenge Trump for the GOP nomination.
“I’ve only just started fighting,” DeSantis promised his supporters in his re-election victory speech.
Trump’s growing legal troubles will also be a factor in the primary and general election battles to come. His family real estate and hotel empire faces a massive fraud lawsuit in New York state that could permanently cripple his operations and reduce his personal wealth.
Trump is also facing an investigation in Georgia over his attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Trump’s new status as a candidate is not expected to impact the fraud suit or the Georgia case.
But now that Trump is officially Biden’s political opponent in the 2024 election, Attorney General Merrick Garland will have to decide whether to appoint a special counsel to take over the day-to-day running of federal investigations into Trump.
The White House is keen to avoid any suggestion that the investigation and potential lawsuits against the president’s chief rival are politically motivated, or that they are designed in any way to damage Trump’s 2024 election prospects.
Whoever wins the Republican primary will likely face the president Joe Biden. The president has yet to officially launch his re-election campaign, but campaign plans have reportedly solidified in recent weeks.
On Tuesday, Trump accused Biden of mismanaging the economy. “In two years, the Biden administration has destroyed the American economy. Destroyed,” he said.
The prospect of a lengthy primary between Trump and DeSantis would be great news for Democrats, in part because Democratic campaign strategists see DeSantis as a formidable challenger.
Biden also likes the idea. When asked by a reporter Nov. 9 about Trump and DeSantis, the president said, “It’ll be fun to see them go head-to-head.”
Despite his setbacks, Trump remains the undisputed leader of the Republican Party, and his loyal base of MAGA conservatives are also Republican primary voters, making him a strong contender from the start.
This week, The Washington Post reported that Trump plans to build a campaign team that looks and feels more like the skeletal crew of loyal aides who led his successful run in 2016, and less like the massive operation in which his transformed his failed bid for re-election in 2020.
Trump enters the race with more than $60 million in cash held by his PAC leadership, Save America, and a prodigious fundraising operation that is sucking up small-dollar donations at an unprecedented rate.
Federal Election Commission rules prohibit Trump from using PAC leadership money to directly fund his presidential campaign.