Trump filed documents establishing his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday night, minutes before he began to address supporters at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida, resort. “America’s comeback begins right now,” Trump said at the start of his remarks, standing in front of more than a dozen American flags and flanked by signs bearing his slogan “Make America Great Again.” The former president is the first Republican to file papers making it official that he will run for president in two years. He is also the first US president to lose his bid for re-election, only to try again, in more than a century. Trump’s entry into the race comes despite several of his chosen candidates losing in last week’s midterms and a growing chorus of voices from within the Republican party urging him to step down. For more than a year, Trump has made no secret of his desire to run again in 2024, repeating his baseless claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him. But Trump held off on the official campaign launch until Tuesday, in part at the urging of advisers and Republicans who did not want it to overshadow the midterms. After the midterms, Trump faced calls to delay his announcement after many of his blockbuster endorsements — including Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz and Arizona Gov. Cary Lake — failed in their races. Others have made private and public calls for Trump to step back from politics and allow a new generation of Republicans to seek the party’s nomination — notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won re-election last week by 19 points. A YouGov poll, conducted after last week’s election and released on Sunday, found that 42 percent of Americans who identify as Republican or lean toward the Republican party said they would prefer to see Desandes as their party’s nominee in 2024, compared to 35 percent. who said they prefer Trump. The Club for Growth, the conservative low-tax group that once supported Trump but has recently broken with him, released a memo Monday citing a poll of likely Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire showing DeSandis leading the way. field in both first two states. it is vital to win the party’s nomination. Among Iowa voters, DeSantis led Trump 48 percent to 37 percent, according to the memo, while in New Hampshire, the Florida governor led the former president 52 percent to 37 percent. DeSantis has not yet said whether he will run for president, but he broke into a smile when the crowd at his victory party last week turned up to encourage him to run, chanting, “Two more years!” In public statements and posts on the social media platform Truth Social, Trump showed little sign of backing down, ripping into DeSandis, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers, notably the New York Post, have throw their weight in a possible DeSantis candidacy. Skeptics questioned whether Trump would reverse course and rescind his announcement or hold off on a formal campaign launch, as he has done several times at rallies in recent months. But Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, appeared on the former president’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast on Friday and insisted he will go ahead. “President Trump is going to announce on Tuesday that he’s running for president, and it’s going to be a very professional, very buttoned-up announcement,” Miller said. Recommended He added that the former president told him: “Of course I am a candidate. I’m going to do that and I want to make sure people know that I’m fired up and that we need 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 running mate, 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 a bid. On the other side of the aisle, Joe Biden has yet to officially say he will run for re-election in 2024. But after better-than-expected Democratic 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 a January 6, 2021 congressional committee investigation 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 has tried to throw out the election results. Additional reporting by Caitlin Gilbert in New York
