San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Trump revs up 2024 candidacy after slow start
SALEM, N.H. — Former President Donald Trump opened his 2024 White House bid with a stop Saturday in New Hampshire before heading to South Carolina, appearances in earlyvoting states marking the first campaign events since announcing his latest run more than two months ago.
“We’re starting. We’re starting right here as a candidate for president,” he told party leaders at the New Hampshire GOP’s annual meeting in Salem before a late afternoon stop in Columbia to introduce his South Carolina leadership team. “I’m more angry now and I’m more committed now than I ever was.”
Those states hold two of the party’s first three nominating contests, giving them enormous influence in selecting the nominee.
Trump and his allies hope the events will offer a show of force behind the former president after a sluggish start to his campaign that left many questioning his commitment to running again. In recent weeks, his backers have reached out to political operatives and elected officials to secure support for Trump at a critical point when other Republicans are preparing their own expected challenges.
“The gun is fired, and the campaign season has started,” said Stephen Stepanek, outgoing chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party. Trump announced that Stepanek will serve as senior adviser for his campaign in the state.
While Trump remains the only declared 2024 presidential candidate, potential challengers, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, are expected to get their campaigns underway in the coming months.
In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster, Sen. Lindsey Graham and several members of the state’s congressional delegation planned to attend Saturday’s event at the Statehouse. But Trump’s team has struggled to
line up support from state lawmakers, even some who eagerly backed him during previous runs.
Some have said that more than a year out from primary balloting is too early to make endorsements or that they are waiting to see who else enters the race. Others have said it is time for the party to move past Trump to a new generation of leadership.
Trump’s nascent campaign has already sparked controversy,
most particularly when he had dinner with Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who had made a series of antisemitic comments. Trump also was widely mocked for selling a series of digital trading cards that pictured him as a superhero, a cowboy and an astronaut, among others.
At the same time, he is the subject of a series of criminal investigations, including one into
the discovery of hundreds of documents with classified markings at his Florida club and whether he obstructed justice by refusing to return them, as well as state and federal examinations of his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Still, Trump remains the only announced 2024 candidate, and early polling shows he’s a favorite to win his party’s nomination.