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Trump Hints Again at a Presidential Run in 2024, Repeats False Election Claims
Donald Trump came to Washington on Tuesday for the first time since leaving the White House 18 months ago, delivering a heated address peppered with strong hints that he may run for president again in 2024.
Trump, 76, did not declare his candidacy, but did lay out his demands for the “next Republican president.”
“I usually say I raced the first time and won, then I ran the second time and performed much better,” Trump stated. “We might simply have to do it again.” Our country must be straightened out.
“I look forward to setting out many more specifics in the coming weeks and months.”
Several hours before Trump took the stage at the right-wing America First Policy Institute, his former vice president, Mike Pence, who is also exploring a presidential run in 2024, spoke to a different conservative group in Washington.
Pence remarked at the Young America’s Foundation conference that Americans must look to the future, not the past, and downplayed differences with Trump.
“I’m not sure where the president and I disagree,” he remarked. “However, we may disagree on the focus.”
Trump’s 90-minute speech to the conservative America First Policy Institute rehashed many of the topics of his successful 2016 campaign, including illegal immigration and crime.
Trump maintained his bogus assertion that he won the 2020 election and blasted the House committee probe into his supporters’ January 6 attack on the US Capitol as the product of “political hacks and thugs.”
“They genuinely want to hurt me so that I can’t come back to work for you,” he explained.
“And I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he concluded, sparking yells of “Four more years!” from the throng.
– ‘Cesspool of criminality’
Trump constantly attacked Democratic Vice President Joe Biden, criticising him for the country’s troubles.
“We are a declining nation,” he declared. “We are a failing nation.”
“Inflation is at its greatest level in 49 years,” Trump remarked. “Gas prices have reached their all-time high in our country’s history.”
He accused Biden of permitting a “invasion” of millions of migrants across the southern border.
The United States, according to Trump, “is becoming a sewer of criminality.”
He accused Biden of “surrendering in Afghanistan” and enabling Russia to invade Ukraine.
“If I were your commander-in-chief, it would never, ever have happened,” he remarked.
Trump has been the country’s most polarising personality since his final Air Force One trip from Washington to Florida on January 20, last year, continuing his unprecedented campaign to sow doubts about his 2020 election loss to Biden.
Hearings in Congress on the January 6 takeover of the Capitol by a Trump mob and his attempts to invalidate the election have captivated Washington for weeks.
With Biden’s favour rating at below 40% and Democrats expected to lose control of Congress in the November midterm elections, Trump appears to be confident that he can ride the Republican wave all the way to the White House in 2024.
On the Democratic side, rage at Trump is also generating fuel in the run-up to the midterm elections.
The House committee hearings have revealed evidence that Trump witnessed an attempt to undermine US democracy, first by attempting to rig electoral procedures behind the scenes, and then by pushing a mob to attack legislators certifying his loss.
Faced with speculation that he is too old at 79 to run for re-election in 2024, Biden says the threat of another Trump candidacy is one of his key motives for running again.
After Trump’s address, the president tweeted, “Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think inciting a mob to attack a police officer is’respect for the law.'”
“You can’t be pro-insurgency and pro-cop — or pro-democracy or pro-American,” Biden added.
