Trump announces 2024 Presidential Run

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Former President Trump, facing questions about his influence over the Republican Party, on Tuesday announced his entry into the 2024 race for the White House.

Trump made the announcement during a much-anticipated event at Mar-a-Lago, his private estate and club in Palm Beach, Fla., just a week after a lackluster midterm election performance denied Republicans the “red wave” they had long anticipated and led to days of finger-pointing within the party.

Flanked by a dozen American flags in a gilded ballroom, Trump delivered a winding speech in which he boasted about — and often exaggerated — his record in the Oval Office and defended his party’s midterm performance, claiming that Republicans had “taken over Congress” and “fired” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Of other Republican midterm failures, Trump claimed that Americans had “not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through.”

“We always have known that this was not the end. It was only the beginning of our fight to rescue the American dream,” Trump said. “In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.”

Even in announcing his latest campaign on Tuesday, Trump suggested that China may have played “a very active role in the 2020 election.” He also insisted that only paper ballots should be used in elections and called for early voting to be abolished, undermining recent calls from some Republicans for the party to focus more on early and mail-in voting.

Fox News on Tuesday briefly cut away from live continuous coverage of former President Trump’s speech announcing his candidacy for president in 2024, while MSNBC gave the speech no live screen time.

The network, which has shied away from covering Trump rallies and other events featuring him live since he left the White House, carried Trump’s remarks for longer than any of the three major cable channels before it broke away.
After Fox cut away, host Sean Hannity, a noted pro-Trump commentator and close personal friend of the former president, took analysis from a number of conservative pundits, including Mike Huckabee, Pete Hegseth and Leo Terrell.
After several minutes of analysis and pro-Trump commentary, the network eventually rejoined his speech from Mar-a-Lago as he concluded his remarks.

CNN also carried Trump’s remarks live but cut away after about 20 minutes to offer analysis from a political panel and fact-checks of the various claims Trump made during his speech on issues ranging from energy to the results of the midterm elections.

MSNBC did not carry Trump’s remarks live at all, instead opting to host a number of leading journalists to talk about the former president’s expected announcement.

Close Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) endorsed the former president’s candidacy before his official announcement at a Mar-a-Lago event, retweeting her previous statements once Trump publicly shared his intention to run.

GOP Reps. Troy Nehls (Rexas) and Andy Biggs (Ariz.) also endorsed the former president, with Nehls sharing a clip of Trump saying: “America’s comeback starts RIGHT NOW.”

“President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party,” said Biggs. “Let’s Make America Great Again.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) did not express outright support for Trump, but did applaud the political strategy used by the former president in his announcement.
“If President Trump continues this tone and delivers this message on a consistent basis, he will be hard to beat,” Graham wrote on Twitter. “His speech tonight, contrasting his policies and results against the Biden Administration, charts a winning path for him in the primaries and general election.”

Other Republican officials, however, including retiring Govs. Larry Hogan of Maryland and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, rejected Trump’s candidacy and predicted that he would fail as the 2024 GOP nominee.

“Doubling down on losing isn’t just foolish. It’s a gift to the Democrats,” wrote Hogan. “It is time to turn the page.”
Hutchinson said that “there are better choices” for a Republican nominee in the upcoming presidential election cycle, sharply criticizing the former president’s character.

“Trump is correct on Biden’s failures, but his self-indulging message promoting anger has not changed. It didn’t work in 2022 and won’t work in 2024,” wrote the governor.

Prominent Republican Jeb Bush, Jr. slammed Trump as “weak,” referring to him “#SleepyDonnie.”
“What a low energy speech by the Donald. Time for new leaders!” wrote Bush as he called for “leadership that unites.”
Former staffers from Trump’s own administration also cast doubt on his choice to run, including former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah, deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews and chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
“This started as, again, sort of professional, it was sort of on script at first, but then just interspersing it with just outright lies, dabbling into conspiracy that maybe China had something to do with the midterms, something I haven’t even seen on the dark corners of the Internet,” Farah said on CNN.

She continued: “No credible person in the Republican Party wanted this announcement today, but this is going to get legs. We are going to be covering him for the next two years and again there’s a non-zero chance he could be president again.”

We don’t even know every result of 2022 yet, but the 2024 election has already begun. On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced that he would seek a second nonconsecutive term as president. While it’s too early to predict Trump’s chances of going all the way, the former president is the current favorite to win the Republican primary again. But nothing is assured.

First, Trump remains popular and influential among Republican voters. According to Civiqs, 80 percent of registered Republican voters have a favorable view of the former president, and only 11 percent have an unfavorable view. Admittedly, he is a little less popular than on Election Day 2020 when 91 percent viewed him favorably. But the decline has been gradual.

Republican voters also demonstrated their loyalty to Trump — or at least his vision for the party — when they nominated 82 percent of the nonincumbents he endorsed in contested Republican primaries for Senate, House and governor.

Granted, that isn’t as impressive as it seems. Several times, Trump endorsed candidates who were already well on their way to winning. And Trump’s endorsees did fail to win certain highly watched contests, like the primary for Georgia governor. But just as often, Trump’s endorsement seemed to give a meaningful polling boost to its recipient. For example, Ohio Senate candidate and author J.D. Vance went from trailing in the polls before Trump’s endorsement to leading in almost every survey afterward.

Trump also leads early polling of the Republican primary by a substantial margin.

Finally, Trump leads in polls of early primary states, albeit generally by smaller margins.

Obviously, we’re still more than a year away from anyone casting their votes, so those numbers could change. But an analysis by my colleague Geoffrey Skelley in 2019 found that national primary polls in the first half of the year before the election are pretty predictive of who will win the nomination.

Historically, from 1972 to 2016, candidates with high name recognition who polled in the 40s and 50s nationally won the nomination more than 75 percent of the time.

But of course, 75 percent isn’t 100 percent, and we’re dealing with a small sample size here. In past presidential primaries, four candidates have polled, on average, between 40 and 60 percent in national polls in the first half of the year before the election. And three of them won their party’s nomination.

On the other hand, then-Sen. Ted Kennedy lost the 1980 Democratic primary despite polling at an average of 47 percent in the first half of 1979. But he was also in a unique situation: He was primarying a sitting president, Jimmy Carter, who wasn’t that far behind him at 32 percent.

One crucial factor will be how many candidates run against Trump. Too many could divide the anti-Trump vote, making it easier for him to win.

Several potential 2024 contenders, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, have indicated that they may run regardless of what Trump does. So this scenario may come to pass. But even if they do run, they may not make it to the primaries, so the race may narrow to a head-to-head between Trump and DeSantis (or another candidate) regardless. This is one of the more significant sources of uncertainty for the 2024 GOP primary — will DeSantis (or another candidate) emerge from 2023’s “invisible primary” as the dominant non-Trump candidate, or will the field still be muddled?

Another source of uncertainty is the many ongoing investigations against Trump. True, Republicans so far have shown little concern over them, but if he is indicted, all bets are off the table, considering that that situation would be unprecedented. It’s plausible that an indictment could affect Republican voters’ perceptions of Trump’s electability in a general election.

When Trump announced his first presidential bid in 2015, we hadn’t seen a candidate quite like him, and his candidacy was difficult to handicap. Even though he began that campaign very unpopular among Republican voters and bitterly opposed by the GOP establishment, predictions of his political demise proved very wrong. Seven years later, Trump is still a unique political figure: A former president hasn’t sought a nonconsecutive second term or faced criminal investigation in generations, and Trump is doing both. This time, he starts the campaign as the front-runner, not the underdog. Still, the lesson is the same: Don’t be overconfident in your predictions. With Donald Trump, anything can happen.

It would be an honor to serve Trump....


To a pack of hungry wolves.

Be careful. That could be mistaken as a form of animal cruelty to the wolves.

There is the potential, if Trump loses the nomination, for him (Trump) to run as an independent. If he does this, the Republicans are dead in 2024.

On Tuesday night, Ivanka Trump announced that she’s done with politics. She did not attend her father’s 2024 campaign announcement (though her husband Jared Kushner was in the audience).

She also said she “never intended to go into politics” or spend four years serving as a senior White House adviser in an extended statement to Fox News. “I’m very proud of what I was able to accomplish,” she said. “I left it all on the field, and I don’t miss it.”

Earlier on Tuesday, the New York Post reported that Donald Trump spent part of his daughter Tiffany Trump’s wedding last weekend trying to convince Ivanka and Jared to join him onstage for the announcement, to no avail:

”Trump thought he could convince Ivanka this weekend to come back and campaign for him as she was the most requested speaker after the president himself last time around … but so far she’s resisting his entreaties and holding firm, as is Jared,” one insider said. “They both feel they got burned in Washington and don’t want to go back and expose themselves and their children to another bitter campaign.”

Even before they left the White House, the couple signaled repeatedly that their careers as political advisers were done. It was reported that during the 2020 campaign, Kushner angrily declared, “I don’t give a f**k about the future of the Republican Party!” Sources told the New York Times<that Jared washed his hands of Trump immediately after Election Day 2020, as he wanted no part of his stolen-election lies. Trump himself later wrote on Truth Social that Ivanka had “checked out” in the final days of his administration (so her damaging testimony to the January 6 committee couldn’t be trusted). Days before the Capitol riot, Ivanka suggested in a CBS News interview that she and her husband wouldn’t serve as White House advisers in a second Trump administration.

In 2021, Jared and Ivanka seemed to be distancing themselves from the ex-president on a personal level, too. They rented a condo in Surfside, Florida, and began renovating a $32 million mansion they bought in Miami’s Billionaire Bunker. Though their new home is just a 90-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, they started seeing far less of the former president. In July 2021, CNN reported that Javanka were rarely seen with Trump in Palm Beach — even ditching him on Father’s Day — and the distance between them was growing “wider by the week”:

But it’s easy to see why Trump still thought he could lure the couple into working for his 2024 campaign. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that recently they’ve been seeing a lot of him in a nonprofessional capacity:

Kushner and Ivanka Trump, however, retain close relationships with the former president, this person added; they golfed with him Friday, and spent the weekend with him at Mar-a-Lago for his daughter Tiffany Trump’s wedding, as well.
And Ivanka told Fox News on Tuesday night that she remains “extremely close” with her father.

Is anyone on this forum actually doing better under Biden than they were under Trump?