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Donald Trump is not allowing the Republican party to move on from him – no matter how desperately some of its members want to.
Announcing his third consecutive presidential campaign at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Tuesday night, Trump made it clear that he viewed himself as the only acceptable option for the 2024 Republican nomination.
“This is not a task for a politician or a conventional candidate,” he said. “This is a task for a great movement that embodies the courage, confidence and the spirit of the American people. The Washington establishment wants to silence us, but we will not let them do that.”
Some of Trump’s most loyal allies in Washington, such as the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, appeared all too happy to let the former president crown himself as the party’s chosen candidate to face off against Joe Biden.
“If President Trump continues this tone and delivers this message on a consistent basis, he will be hard to beat,” said Graham. “His speech, contrasting his policies and results against the Biden administration, charts a winning path for him in the primaries and general election.”
But the speech failed to win over all Republicans, some of whom expressed concern that Trump’s 2024 effort would repeat the failure of his 2020 campaign, when he lost the popular vote by 7 million and the electoral college 306-232.
The results of last week’s midterm elections intensified such fears, as many of the candidates Trump endorsed in high-profile races were defeated by Democrats. Politicians who embraced Trump’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election, such as Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, fared particularly poorly.
“He needs to get independent [and] swing voters,” Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former acting chief of staff, said on Twitter.
