The former president and former coup plotter offers the same argument to voters that he always has.
On Tuesday evening, that vibe — very familiar to southern Florida — permeated Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s event space in Palm Beach. The former president appeared in a ballroom at the facility to announce that he was pivoting back to seeking elected office after last seeking to claim political power by subverting the constitutional process that led to his ouster from the White House. So, for the third time, we got a speech from Donald Trump about how he should be elected president, for all of the reasons that he offered in each of the prior two campaign announcements.
If you didn’t watch the speech, it doesn’t matter: you’ve heard all of it before, in 2015 or 2016 or 2017 or 2018 or 2019 or 2020 or 2021 or sometime earlier this year. There was nothing about it that was new or novel in any way.
Even Trump seemed bored about it, like Jimmy Buffett just getting through the chords that stood between him and his paycheck. Trump began by reading from the teleprompter, as he often does, offering up his familiar pastiche of dishonesties, metaphors and exaggerations. There was an unmistakable accent of Stephen Miller, the right-wing former administration official who wrote many of Trump’s speeches and who emerged from backstage shortly before Trump began to speak.
