Convinced that he led his troops to “a very big victory” in the midterm elections held last week in the United States, even if the results of the polls show the contrary, Donald Trump would prepare to formalize his candidacy for the presidential election of 2024 on Tuesday evening. Two years before this next electoral deadline.
A “special announcement” of which the ex-president has been trying to raise expectations for several days, but which is far from unanimous within the Republican Party itself, where several voices are now heard to call instead to break with populism, held partly responsible for the mixed results of the last election for the opposition party.
“The voters spoke and said they wanted another leader. They sent a clear message [en disant] Enough is enough,” Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears summed up on Fox Business last week. In the past, the elected Republican has been an ardent supporter of the ex-president, by co-directing, among other things, the group Black Americans, which sought to mobilize the African-American vote in favor of the real estate mogul during the 2020 presidential election. “A true leader understands that it is time to leave the stage,” she added. And that moment when you have to move on has just arrived. »
Last Friday, longtime Donald Trump adviser Jason Miller confirmed to extremist and conspiratorialist Steve Bannon during his podcast radical War Room that the ex-president was going to announce Tuesday evening, from his Florida residence in Mar-a-Lago, “that he would run for president” in 2024. “It’s going to be a very professional, very neat announcement”, a- he added.
Republicans expected a wave of red — their party color — across the US legislature, but that didn’t happen. This impulse of the moment was also expected by Donald Trump to give fuel to the launch of his campaign for the next presidential election.
After the 2020 loss and the 2022 results, Republicans should be fed up with Trump, whose behavior is taking victory out of their mouths
“The midterm elections were very bad for Donald Trump,” commented in an interview Michael Behrent, professor of history at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, specialist in American political thought. “Not only were several candidates whom he had personally dubbed, such as Don Bolduc in New Hampshire or Mehmet Öz in Pennsylvania, defeated, but Republicans who distanced themselves from Trump often realized, within the same state , better scores than the Trumpism candidates. »
In Georgia, for example, Republican Governor Brian Kemp won re-election with 53.4%, while the party’s senator contender, Herschel Walker, the ex-president’s choice, n collected only 48.5% of the vote, behind the Democrat Raphael Warnock, with whom he will have to cross swords again on December 6, during a second round.
From solution to problem
“The 2022 election has seriously weakened Donald Trump’s ability to secure the Republican presidential nomination for 2024,” said Republican political strategist Gary Sasse, contacted by The duty in Rhode Island. His interventions in the primaries destroyed the Republican Party’s chances of taking control of the Senate. It is now more than obvious to a majority of Republicans that Donald Trump is driven by idiosyncratic self-interest and not party good or even public interest. »
He adds, “After the 2020 loss and the 2022 results, Republicans should be fed up with Trump, whose behavior is taking victory out of their mouths. Bringing into the race a candidate of whom only 35 to 39 percent of Americans currently have a favorable opinion would be a serious political mistake. »
Last week, several relatives of the ex-president tried to dissuade him from launching hastily into the presidential election of 2024, in view of the political portrait delivered by the ballot boxes during the mid-term elections. Joe Biden offered unexpected resistance: in twenty years, no American president had managed to save the furniture to this point during this ballot, however historically unfavorable to the occupant of the White House and his party. Especially when it comes to a Democrat.
Former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany believes the populist should wait until after Georgia’s second round of voting before starting his campaign. “The 2022 election is not over,” she said on Fox News. All Republican energy must be harnessed to block Biden’s political agenda, and that could go straight through the state of Georgia. »
“In my opinion, if Trump announces his intention to run on Tuesday night, such an action is going to have a negative impact on Herschel Walker and his chances of winning the Senate seat in Georgia,” added Gary Sasse.
Front-end criticism
In conservative circles, critics of Donald Trump are no longer afraid to be heard publicly and frontally. Last Thursday the New York Post, a tabloid yet very right and behind Trump for years, caricatured him on its front page as Humpty Dumpty, a character from an English ditty dating from the XVe century, the embodiment of an irremediable egg-shaped loser. “Don […] took a big fall,” it read. “Are all men [sic] of the Republican Party can bring the party back together? »
In a scathing editorial, the wall street journal, property of press magnate Rupert Murdoch, who has accompanied the rise of the populist since 2016, among others with his Fox News television network, called the ex-president “the biggest loser of the Republican Party”.
“Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the much hated Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat, can we read. […] He led Republicans from one political fiasco to another. »
“What Tuesday night’s results indicate is that Trump may have become the most significant electoral repellent in modern American history,” conservative columnist John Podhoretz wrote in the pages of the New York Post. The surest way to lose in those midterm elections was to be a Trump-backed candidate. It’s time for even his supporters to accept the truth: Toxic Trump is the political equivalent of a bomb [d’insecticide] Raid. »
For the President of the Republicans of Summit County in Ohio, Bryan C. Williams, the candidacy of Donald Trump is one thing, “but it is far from guaranteeing him a victory in the eventual primaries”, he commented. a few days ago in an interview in his office located in Akron, in the heart of the American Rust Belt. “Trump has two types of supporters, those who support him and those who support him to empower the Republican Party. However, this second group is less and less inclined to come to its defence. »
A post-election poll last week by YouGov shows that Republicans now seem to believe more in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (42%) than Donald Trump (35%). to wear the colors of the Republican Party during the next presidential election. A first since the defeat of the populist in 2020.