Donald Trump is widely expected to launch a third bid for the White House on Tuesday night, despite several of his handpicked candidates losing in last week’s US midterm elections and a growing chorus of voices from within the Republican party urging the former president to step aside.
He is set to make what his advisers have described as a “special announcement” at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach, Florida, which Trump referred to as his “winter White House” when he was president.
For more than a year, he has made no secret of his desire to run again for the presidency in 2024, repeating his baseless claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him.
The former president has so far held off on formally launching a campaign, in part at the urging of advisers and national Republicans who did not want him to overshadow last week’s midterms. But on November 7, the eve of election day, Trump said he would make a “very big announcement” on November 15.
After the midterms, however, Trump faced fresh calls to delay his announcement after Republicans underperformed expectations and many of his blockbuster endorsements — including Senate candidates Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters and Adam Laxalt — fell short in their races.
Others made private and public appeals for the former president to step off the political stage altogether and allow a new generation of Republicans to seek their party’s nomination in 2024 — notably Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, who won re-election last week by a landslide 19 points.
A YouGov poll conducted after last week’s elections and published on Sunday showed that 42 per cent of Americans who identified as Republicans or leaned towards the Republican party said they would prefer to see DeSantis as their party’s nominee in 2024, compared to 35 per cent who said they preferred Trump.
The Club for Growth, the conservative low-tax group that once backed Trump but has broken with him of late, released a memo on Monday citing polling of likely Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, showing DeSantis leading the field in both early states that are crucial to winning the party’s presidential nomination.
Among Iowa voters, DeSantis led Trump 48 per cent to 37 per cent, according to the memo, while in New Hampshire, the Florida governor led the former president 52 per cent to 37 per cent.
DeSantis has not yet said whether he will seek the presidency, but broke into a smile when the crowd at his victory party last week appeared to encourage him to run, shouting: “Two more years!”
In public statements and posts on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump has shown little sign of backing down, tearing into DeSantis, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers, notably The New York Post, have thrown their weight behind a possible DeSantis candidacy.
Sceptics have questioned whether Trump will change course and cancel his announcement, or stop short of launching a formal campaign, as he has done several times at rallies in recent months. But Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump, appeared on the podcast of the former president’s one-time chief political strategist Steve Bannon on Friday and insisted he would go ahead.
“President Trump is going to announce on Tuesday that he is running for president, and it is going to be a very professional, very buttoned up announcement,” Miller said.
He added that the former president told him: “Of course I’m running. I’m going to do this, and I want to make sure that people know that I’m fired up, and we’ve got to get the country back on track.”
It remains unclear how many Republicans would challenge Trump for his party’s nomination for president. In addition to DeSantis, Mike Pence, his vice-president, has hinted at a run, as has Larry Hogan, the centrist outgoing governor of Maryland. Glenn Youngkin, the former Carlyle executive who was elected governor of Virginia last year, is also reportedly weighing up a bid.
On the other side of the aisle, Joe Biden has not yet formally said that he will run for re-election in 2024. But after Democrats’ better than expected results in the midterms, he sent the strongest signal yet that he will seek a second term, saying: “Our intention is to run again.”
Tuesday’s announcement comes as Trump faces several legal challenges, including the ongoing probe by the January 6 congressional committee into his role in the attack on the US Capitol and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
On Monday, the US Supreme Court cleared the way for the committee to obtain phone records of Kelli Ward, who chairs the Republican party in Arizona, one of several states where Trump sought to have the election results thrown out.
