Former President Donald Trump made stops in South Carolina and New Hampshire Saturday seeking to rally early support for his 2024 campaign for President.
Former President Donald Trump officially kicked off his campaign for president Saturday with a pair of intimate rallies in the early voting states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, representing an early effort to coalesce support from key players he will need to secure his party’s nomination in 2024.
Appearing at a meeting of the New Hampshire Republican Party Saturday, Trump announced he would be appointing outgoing New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman Stephen Stepanek to oversee his campaign in the Granite State, securing him a high-profile surrogate in the first-in-the-nation primary state he lost by 7 points just two years earlier.
Hours later in South Carolina, the former president unveiled a leadership team in the crucial primary state that included figures like current Gov. Henry McMaster, freshman Republican Congressman Russell Fry, former Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham; a show of force intended to hold other prospective candidates—including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—at-bay as they weigh their own White House bids.
“He did it once, he can do it again,” Graham told attendees. “How many times have you heard we don’t want Donald Trump but we like his policies? There are no Trump policies without Trump.”
“You can talk about his policies,” he added. “But you cannot do what he did.”
Trump used the opportunity he had to remind the roughly 350 of his closest supporters assembled there exactly why they supported him in the first place.
In roughly half-an-hour of remarks, Trump walked those gathered under the statehouse capitol dome through his greatest hits—riffs on the deep state and electric cars, anger over gas prices and jabs at the FBI and Hunter Biden’s laptop, denigrations of polling and the “fake news media,” even a reprise of his claim of “murderers and rapists” coming across the southern border—that elicited alternating laughs and cheers from the crowd.
