Trump’s long-awaited 2024 presidential announcement was widely panned as a low-energy affair.
It’s official. He’s running.
Just a week after the midterm elections, before either party has officially secured a House majority, the 2024 presidential horse race has already begun.
Former president Donald Trump formally announced his 2024 bid for president on Tuesday night, in a speech at Mar-a-Lago. The announcement comes at a precarious time for Trump, whose status as GOP kingmaker has come into question after his hand-picked candidates had a poor showing in the midterms.
But the announcement itself — contained in a long, lackluster speech — is about where the drama began and ended Tuesday night.
Former Trump aide Sarah Matthews, who resigned on the day of the Capitol riot and later testified before the House January 6 committee, said of the launch: “This is one of the most low-energy, uninspiring speeches I’ve ever heard from Trump. Even the crowd seems bored. Not exactly what you want when announcing a presidential run.”
Even Fox News declined to run the entire speech live, cutting out less than halfway through so that its commentators could lavish praise on the ex-president, rather than letting viewers hear what he had to say.
Several Trump allies were absent from the speech, including Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, who said he would miss the speech due to inclement weather. Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were also missing from the audience. Ivanka said she does not plan to be involved in politics this time around.
The New York Post, which long held a favorable view of the former president, tucked news of the announcement into page 26, teasing the story on the front page with a tongue-in-cheek headline: “Florida Man Makes Announcement.” The paper wrote: “Some members of [Trump’s] roughly 1,000-strong audience began speaking among themselves and ignoring his words toward the end.”
The ribbing comes after the paper published a cover last week portraying Trump as Humpty Dumpty, with the caption: “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall — can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?”
Yet on Murdoch-owned Fox News, Hannity cut to Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee to cover for Trump as his speech continued off-air. The pair argued that Trump would be “unbeatable” if he continues giving similar speeches.
Ahead of the launch, Republican New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu called the timing “a pretty bad decision” from a political standpoint. “It doesn’t make much sense given he’s kind of at his weakest point politically. I’m not even sure he’s the front-runner,” Sununu said.
Even diehard Trump ally Jason Miller publicly urged his former boss to wait until after the Georgia Senate runoff to announce his candidacy.
“I’m advising the president to hold off until after the Georgia race, after Herschel Walker. . . . This is bigger than anything else in the country,” Miller said on Newsmax, though he was speaking prior to incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s victory in Nevada, which dashed GOP hopes for a majority.
While Trump is the only candidate to formally announce his 2024 ambitions, recent polling has shown Florida governor Ron DeSantis surging ahead of Trump, a development that the former president has not taken kindly to. Trump lashed out at “Governor Ron DeSanctimonious” last week, claiming credit for his political rise and calling him “an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations.”
DeSantis responded on Tuesday ahead of Trump’s campaign launch, saying: “One of the things I’ve learned in this job is when you’re leading, when you’re getting things done, you take incoming fire, that’s just the nature of it.”
“At the end of the day, I would just tell people to go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night,” he continued.
Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who has declined to rule out his own 2024 bid, tweeted his own take ahead of the Trump speech: “As we expect an announcement from Mar-a-Lago tonight it is important to welcome new voices and ideas for our future. I intend to be one of those leaders working for solutions to the serious challenges ahead.”
Another likely 2024 contender, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, said Tuesday that his own decision about whether to run for president in 2024 will not be influenced by whether or not former president Trump chooses to run and called for “more seriousness” in the GOP.
He followed up that comment, made on radio host Hugh Hewitt’s program, with a tweet echoing the theme, though lacking any explicit mention of Trump.
“We need more seriousness, less noise, and leaders who are looking forward, not staring in the rearview mirror claiming victimhood,” he wrote in the tweet.
Meanwhile, questions of how the media would handle a third Trump run were answered Tuesday night. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler and CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale quickly resumed their positions after deciding that President Biden wasn’t in need of a full-time fact-checker, while several news outlets injected the Capitol riot and Trump’s legal woes into their headlines and ledes.
The Washington Post headlined its story, “Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he is running again.”
In a tweet about the announcement, the Associated Press wrote: “Trump, who refused to accept his 2020 defeat, faces multiple criminal investigations.” HuffPost began its piece: “Donald Trump, the only U.S. president to have attempted a coup to remain in power and who is now under multiple criminal investigations for it, nevertheless announced Tuesday night that he is running to regain his old job in 2024.”
NPR said: “Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024.”
Trump’s most vocal critics were active as ever on Tuesday: Representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), who has served as vice chairman of the House committee investigating January 6 but lost her bid for reelection, said she is “confident” Trump will never be president again. Representative David Cicilline (D., R.I.) circulated legislation to prohibit Trump from holding office.
However, not all was lost for the former and would-be president: The Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group praised Trump’s record on abortion, saying he “raised the bar for what it means to be a pro-life presidential candidate and president,” and described the 2024 election as the “human rights battle of our time.”
Around NR
• The Editors issued a resounding “No” on the prospect of a second term for Trump, noting that his administration was “chaotic even on its best days because of his erratic nature and lack of seriousness.”
He often acted as if he were a commentator on his own presidency, and issued orders on Twitter and in other off-the-cuff statements that were ignored. He repeatedly had to be talked out of disastrous ideas by his advisers and Republican elected officials. He turned on cabinet officials and aides on a dime. Trump had a limited understanding of our constitutional system, and at the end of the day, little respect for it. His inability to approximate the conduct that the public expects of a president undermined him from beginning to end.
• Dan McLaughlin says politics is all about matching the man to the moment, and Trump’s moment was six years ago. The 2022 exit polls reveal two clear findings, he writes:
(1) Donald Trump is profoundly unpopular with the people who voted in 2022 and (2) Trump was a fatal drag on many Republican candidates.
• Trump’s Tuesday night announcement had a “familiar and tired feel,” Rich Lowry writes.
The ending was an extended riff on “Make America Great Again,” because he hasn’t been able to come up with a fresh slogan. When he descended the escalator, Trump represented the shock of the new. Now, he’s the same old guy with the same old riffs, trying to hold on one last time. He might succeed, but it’s not going to be because he’s new and interesting.
• With Trump holding onto his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and adding new claims that Democrats stole the Arizona Senate election, Jay Nordlinger says:
The thing about crying wolf is — it’s hard to do it over and over. People get wary, and weary. Even some MAGA people, I wager, are having doubts — doubts about the wolf act. And anti-anti-MAGA people? They are eager to change the subject.
• Several post-election polls showed promising news for a potential DeSantis run. As I reported earlier this week, the Florida governor led Trump by eleven points in a new poll of likely Republican primary voters by the Republican Party of Texas. Forty-three percent of respondents said they would support DeSantis, while Trump followed in second with 32 percent of the vote. Thirteen percent of respondents said they were undecided, while 5 percent said they would support former vice president Mike Pence.
• A YouGov poll of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents found 42 percent want DeSantis to be the party’s 2024 nominee, while 35 percent would prefer Trump, Isaac Schorr reports.