Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced his third run for the White House, becoming the first Republican to enter the 2024 presidential race and brushing aside criticism over the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and recent intraparty anger about the GOP’s struggles in the midterm elections.
Trump, 76, declared his candidacy in Palm Beach, Florida, almost two years out from the November 2024 national elections and after publicly flirting with a pre-midterm entry over the summer. Official paperwork forming the “Donald J. Trump for President 2024″ campaign committee was filed with the Federal Election Commission just prior to his speech.
“America’s comeback starts right now,” he said before a cheering audience.
He has continued to hold a brisk schedule of rallies this year, unbowed by a criminal investigation that has included an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, or by a House probe that exposed his erratic behavior during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Trump, still popular among rank-and-file Republicans, appears the early front-runner to earn the Republican nomination for the White House, though the field has yet to take shape.
The timing of his 2024 announcement is exceptionally early. Most candidates for the White House launch their campaigns within a year before the election.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is seen as the best-positioned Republican to beat Trump, and the former president has conjured a nickname for the Florida executive: “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, is another possible contender.
Trump’s often-damaged political brand was dented anew by the midterm elections. Frustrated Republicans blamed him for their party’s inability to continue a pattern of out-of-power parties scoring sweeping wins midway through a president’s first term.
Though results are still coming in, Democrats kept control of the Senate and are on track to limit any new Republican majority in the House to a tiny margin. Trump-backed candidates struggled.
Republican strategists have expressed skepticism about Trump’s general election viability, and anti-Trump forces within the party were emboldened by the midterms.
Still, Trump won almost 140 million votes in two presidential general elections, and remains a formidable force in American politics — even stripped of his social media accounts, trailed by investigations and damaged by his 2020 election lies.
“He has a very strong base within the Republican primary voter electorate that makes it very difficult to take him on,” said Gunner Ramer, the political director of the Republican Accountability Project, an anti-Trump group.
During his first run at the White House, the Queens-born Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He beat Hillary Clinton in the general election after steamrolling the GOP primary field.
Americans rejected Trump’s divisive and turbulent presidency in the 2020 election: President Joe Biden beat him by 74 votes in the Electoral College and about 7 million ballots in the popular vote.
Trump baselessly said he won, and inspired legions of his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress prepared to certify the results.
Biden, 79, has said he intends to run for reelection as the oldest presidential incumbent ever, but he has not launched a campaign. He may be especially motivated to take on Trump.
In a September speech in Philadelphia, Biden said that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
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