In a rambling and lie-filled speech at his decrepit Florida party hall, Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump announced Tuesday evening that he would like another chance at being president.
The disgraced former chief executive’s announcement was the earliest ever for a presidential aspirant. According to multiple press reports, the twice-impeached former POTUS decided to proclaim his candidacy nearly two years early in an effort to counteract a rising tide of anger among Republican politicians and right-wing media figures who have blamed Trump for endorsing extremist candidates who performed poorly in 2022 elections in various states. Though he has filed formal papers with the Federal Election Commission to run, Trump has yet to name a campaign manager or any high-level personnel for his hastily organized effort.
The newly minted candidate’s remarks were overwhelmingly similar to scores of interminable rants Trump has been delivering at political rallies for Republican candidates since being ejected from the White House in 2021 following his incitement of a violent riot in which his supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol and attempted to kill members of Congress and his former vice president, Mike Pence. Besides his usual laundry list of false claims about his supposed accomplishments and coded “storm” references for the QAnon cult, there was very little about what a second Trump administration would do—much less how he might do things differently after he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
Trump had attempted for months to build hype for yet another presidential campaign but the repetitive and low-energy speech he delivered was met with a mixture of indifference and disappointment among many of his long-time supporters.
His favored daughter, Ivanka, presaged the reaction with an Instagram post shortly before the event in which she said she would be retiring from politics.
On “Truth Social,” Trump’s struggling Twitter clone, neither his name nor his announcement were listed as a topic that users were discussing late Tuesday evening. Even the staunchly Republican Fox News Channel declined to air the event in full, as did CNN and MSNBC. Several people who attended Trump’s speech in person tried to leave before it was over but were prevented from doing so by event security.