The former president has been eager to declare his candidacy, hoping to get ahead of likely rivals and potential criminal charges.
Donald Trump, the twice-impeached 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 on Tuesday night 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 Tuesday, 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 Tuesday night at his Mar-a-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 Tuesday night 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 also 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, already winning the appointment of an independent monitor.
A defeated former president running for election again while facing potential criminal indictment is unprecedented in U.S. history. Trump becomes the first former president to run again since Theodore Roosevelt, and the first since Grover Cleveland do so after losing reelection. He is the only president to be impeached twice, and the only one impeached by a bipartisan vote.
Almost two years on, Trump’s divisiveness has remained a defining feature of American politics, reshaping the Republican Party in his image as much as he has mobilized Democrats against him and strained the checks and balances in every branch and level of government. In exit polls by AP VoteCast, 54 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, including 44 percent who were “very unfavorable.” The same survey found 34 percent of midterm voters said they cast their ballot to express opposition to Trump, with 22 percent who said they were voting as an expression of support for him and 41 percent who said he wasn’t a factor.
The GOP’s disappointing midterm results have heightened efforts within the party to move on from Trump. On Monday, David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth, said the group’s research showed Trump’s attacks on other Republicans are taking a toll on his support and joined calls for him to delay his announcement until after the Georgia runoff. Many of the party’s top donors, who were often not Trump’s biggest fans to begin with, have begun private conversations about how best to sideline him for a new generation of leaders, according to people in touch with them.
“He’s doing it from a place of defensiveness, of his own self-opportunity and weakness,” New Hampshire Gov.
