Trump launches bid to retake White House
Donald Trump, the twiceimpeached former president who refused to concede defeat and inspired a failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election culminating in a deadly attack on the Capitol, officially declared yesterday that he is running to retake the White House in 2024.
The announcement at his Florida Mar-a-Lago Club came in a moment of political vulnerability for Trump as voters resoundingly rejected his endorsed candidates in last week’s midterm elections.
Since then, elected Republicans have been unusually forthright in blaming Trump for the party’s underperformance and potential rivals are already openly plotting challenging Trump for the nomination.
Trump has been eager to reclaim the spotlight and pressure Republicans to line up behind him, inviting prominent party leaders to his launch event and keeping track of who attended.
Advisers spent much of the year lobbying Trump to hold off announcing until after the midterms, arguing that he might motivate Democratic voters or get drowned out by election news. He finally agreed to promise a ‘‘very big announcement’’ for yesterday, and stuck with that plan despite further efforts to convince him to wait until after next month’s runoff for a Georgia Senate seat.
‘‘This comeback starts right now,’’ Trump said at his Mara-Lago resort, the site three months ago of an FBI search warrant to recover records he took from the White House, including some that were highly classified.
Trump’s attorneys filed paperwork yesterday with the Federal Election Commission for a newly named ‘‘Donald J. Trump for President 2024’’ committee. The filing said the new campaign would coordinate with an existing Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee, allowing him to potentially raise money at the same time for other political efforts.
Trump’s urgency to announce also comes from wanting to get ahead of a potential indictment in any of the several ongoing criminal investigations into his conduct.
He and close associates are under multiple criminal investigations by the Justice Department for the effort to submit phony electors claiming Trump won key states in the 2020 election and for the mishandling of classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago; and by an Atlanta-area prosecutor for pressuring Georgia officials to overturn that state’s election results.
His company is in the middle of a trial for criminal tax fraud and the New York attorney general filed a lawsuit that could freeze the company’s operations.
A defeated former president running for election again while facing potential criminal indictment is unprecedented in US history. Trump becomes the first former president to run again since Theodore Roosevelt, and the first since Grover Cleveland do so after losing re-election. –