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Former President Trump is seeking to reclaim the political stage with a Tuesday evening event at his Mar-a-Lago resort that he first teased a week ago, before the midterm elections.
The expectation is that Trump will announce a 2024 campaign for the presidency — a quest that, if it succeeds, would make him the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve nonconsecutive terms.
Trump has floated the possibility of another White House bid more or less constantly since leaving office almost two years ago.
Now the moment is here, and several big questions are about to be answeredWill Trump actually declare his candidacy?
The biggest question is the most obvious — will Trump truly launch a 2024 bid?
Up until results started coming in from last week’s midterms, it sounded like a done deal.
But Trump had a miserable cycle. High-profile endorsees such as Mehmet Oz, Doug Mastriano, Blake Masters and Tudor Dixon all lost. Exit polls showed 58 percent of voters holding an unfavorable impression of Trump, far overtaking the 39 percent who view him favorably.
Trump had once hoped to take advantage of a tailwind of success from the midterms. Instead, the GOP is debating the extent to which he is an electoral millstone around the party’s neck.
Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) told Fox News last week that Trump had “become a liability.” Longer-standing Trump critics within the GOP such as Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have raised their own objections with new vigor.
Hogan told CNN on Sunday that 2022 represented “basically the third election in a row that Donald Trump has cost us the race.”
The suddenly chilly climate has reportedly led some Trump advisers to advocate for the postponement of a 2024 launch.
And there is a further complication: the Senate runoff in Georgia, set for Dec. 6, between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) and former football star Herschel Walker (R), another Trump endorsee.
The political danger for Trump is that he announces a White House bid, the race in Georgia becomes a proxy judgement on him and his candidate loses.
