After months, if not years, of speculation, former President Donald Trump made it official Tuesday night, announcing his intention to run for a third time and return to the White House for a brief period after being ousted in 2020 by President Joe Biden. .
The announcement, while expected, still represents a seismic moment in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. By throwing his hat into the race at this early stage, Trump has planted his flag well and challenged rising Republicans like Gov. Ron DeSantis. (R-Fla. ) and Glenn Youngkin (R-Va. ) They try the wrath of their MAGA if they defy their way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
While Republicans are still upset with his disappointing performance in the 2022 midterm elections, and some are already looking to use the party as a turning point for the party to abandon Trump, the former president’s announcement lands in a decidedly different environment than Trump’s. Despite Trump’s stated goal of reflecting the insurrectionary temperament of this campaign, his 2024 candidacy is a capitalization of the highly political movement he has built within the Republican Party over the past six years, a movement he stoked to see his return to power. White House. as an inevitability than a possibility.
So now that Trump is officially in the race, where things are:
Yes, for now, at least. Trump continues to vote ahead of other potential Republican candidates nationally, though some statewide polls show DeSantis leading Trump into a hypothetical head-to-head showdown after the midterm elections. Trump’s prestige as a front-runner has been bolstered through the crusade infrastructure he has built over the years. This includes an extensive fundraising apparatus, as well as an active mailing list that spreads the former president’s favorite narrative to his supporters.
Basically, as the first, and to date, the only Republican to officially announce his candidacy, Trump has already begun to secure the prestige of the favorites by getting official endorsements before anyone else; Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 Republican in the House, has already subsidized Trump as the party’s “very clear” leader, while MAGA’s unwavering representative, Jim Banks (R-Ind. ), is also preparing to do so. For his part, Trump has publicly endorsed Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif. ) to become the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives in the next Congress, in what is widely seen as an attempt to boost the 2024 race.
While it remains to be seen whether Trump’s mere presence is enough to scare any potential Republican challenger, his presence as the only declared candidate so far propels him to front-runner status.
While the top presidential election is largely based on conflicting visions for the country’s future, Trump’s mere presence in the political arena has traditionally served as a black hole, forcing everyone on his periphery to reflexively orient themselves around him, and robbing them of bandwidth. by their own attempts to establish the agfinisha. ” Every time “Republicans have challenged Trump in the past,” the other people who did ended up backing down and explicitly or tacitly backed down, or faced Trump’s wrath and saw their political careers (if not their cable news reserves) crumble,” Damon Linker told The Week last winter. “Say what you want about DeSantis, [Mike] Pence, [Ted] Cruz, [Nikki] Haley and [Tom] Cotton, but I do I don’t feel like any of them aspire to political martyrdom or at the end of their career with a concert on MSNBC. “
By all indications, 2024 will be no different; Trump has already worked to assert his dominance over potential rivals, calling them unfortunate beneficiaries of his willing sense of the king while disparaging them with derogatory nicknames.
The fact that the GOP has already begun to question whether Trump’s policy (or at least the appearance of it) is electorally viable only reinforces the sense that 2024 will be an intraparty referendum on Trump in ways that his automatic nomination as sitting president in 2020 will never allow. For applicants hoping to lead a post-Trump Republican Party, this presents a delicate balance between making substantive criticisms of the former president without frustrating his hardcore supporters who dominate the Republican electoral base.
For his part, Trump has already signaled an unsurprising willingness to confront any dissent within the party head-on, ordering his supporters to attack more established Republican lawmakers, while presenting himself as the antidote, rather than the momentum, to the anemic Republican Party midterm. results. Expect this to be the defining dynamic of the upcoming number one season.
Donald Trump liked to boast that his number one run of 2016 was completely self-funded, before adopting a “world-class monetary organization” for this general election, and welcomed massive help from the PAC in his first re-election bid. Eventually, however, major Republican donors and consolidators began to publicly distance themselves from the former president, a very sensible funder of Republican reasons who told the Wall Street Journal that “I think it’s time for a replacement for our party and our country. “recent assembly of the Republican Governors Association, where the anti-Trump positions of other donors were applauded by the various participants.
Hedge fund billionaire Griffin, the second-largest conservative who spent the most in the last election, came up with a similar criticism: “[Trump] has done a lot of things very well and hasn’t hit the mark in some vital areas,” Griffin, who in the past had donated $100,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee, told Politico. “For a litany of reasons, I think it’s time to move on to the next generation. “
With Republican supporters increasingly willing to combine tactics with Trump, other applicants now have new avenues to make crusade money that can put them on a higher footing to rival Trump’s private fortune and grassroots fundraising. It is a fact that Trump himself is well aware of having ordered several joint donors to split between him and DeSantis to avoid supporting the midterm governor of Florida.
While no stranger to legal dangers and criminal allegations, Trump’s third crusade for the White House is positioning itself under a single, and namely, threatening, cloud of simultaneous investigations; He convened through the Select Committee on the January 6 attacks; faces possible fees arising from the ownership of classified documents on its Mar-a-Lago property; and there is a “substantial risk” that he will be prosecuted for his efforts to nullify the effects of the 2020 elections in Georgia.
Legally, there appears to be no precedent for Trump to be excluded from the race, prosecuted, or even convicted, despite the fact that several defense teams have unsuccessfully filed lawsuits to prevent the participants in the 6 uprising. January seek work for constitutional reasons. . . Most likely, any pending impeachment trial will have political, though not necessarily legal, ramifications for the Trump campaign.
In an interview with conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewett this summer, Trump warned of “big trouble” if he is indicted and said the electorate “would not bear” any charges against him. Following his candidacy through the two Republican challengers and eventually the Democratic presidential nominee, Trump has spent years instilling in his supporters the accusations opposing him as part of a broader “witch hunt” designed to undermine his selfless political goals.
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