Trump hints at 2024 campaign, says he’ll be ‘actively working’ to elect Republicans
Former President Donald Trump vowed Sunday he’ll be out on the campaign trail “actively working” to back “strong” Republican candidates, and even hinted he may himself run again.
Trump during his first speech since leaving the White House said he will be “actively working to elect strong, tough and smart Republican leaders” in the midterms.
“With your help, we will take back the House, we will win the Senate and then a Republican president will make a triumphant return to the White House, and I wonder who that will be,” Trump said. “Who, who, who will that be? I wonder.”
Trump during a 90-minute speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida teased a 2024 presidential campaign after losing to President Biden in November.
The former president has continued to spread his false claims of widespread voter fraud, and maintains that he won the election against Biden even though he lost by a 306-232 Electoral College margin.
“Who knows, I may even decide to beat them (Democrats) for a third time,” Trump said, leading to raucous applause from the packed audience and chants of, “USA.”
“It is far from being over,” Trump said of his political career, adding, “Let there be no doubt, we will be victorious, and America will be stronger and greater than ever before.”
Former presidents usually lay low in the first year after leaving the White House but not Trump, who’s the favorite to be the Republican Party’s nominee in 2024.
“Do you miss me yet?” Trump asked at the start of his speech.
The former president blasted Biden and said Democrats will “suffer withering losses” in the midterms and will lose the White House “decisively” in 2024.
Following the deadly insurrection of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives and then acquitted in the Senate. A majority of senators voted to convict him on the charge of inciting an insurrection for the Capitol riot, but the vote was short of the two-thirds necessary to convict.
In his speech, Trump mostly steered clear of the insurrection but continued to promote his false voter fraud claims, and said the election was “rigged.”
“Had we had a fair election, the results would’ve been much different,” Trump said of the 2020 election.
Trump did win Sunday’s CPAC straw poll for the 2024 Republican presidential primary. He received 55% in the straw poll, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with 21% and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem with 4%. The CPAC straw poll found that more than two-thirds of attendees, 68%, want Trump to run again for president.
“There has never been a journey so successful,” said Trump, who’s the only president to ever be impeached twice.
Trump was also the first incumbent president to lose re-election since former President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
He shot down the idea of forming a third party heading into the next presidential election.
“We are not starting new parties,” Trump said. “You know they kept saying, ‘He’s going to start a brand-new party.’ We have the Republican Party. It’s going to unite and be stronger than ever before. I am not starting a new party.”
“Standing before you today, I am supremely confident that for our movement, for our party and for our country, our brightest days are just ahead,” he said. “And that together, we will make America prouder, freer, stronger and greater than it ever has been before.”
The former president also called out every Republican member of Congress that voted to impeach and convict him for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, including Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney.
“We cannot have leaders who show more passion for condemning their fellow Americans than they have ever shown for standing up to Democrats, the media and the radicals who want to turn America into a socialist country,” Trump said.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3kuQkMX
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