Donald Trump launches 2024 presidential bid

Former US President Donald Trump has announced his intention to seek the White House again in 2024.

Trump launched the bid – his third for the presidency – on Tuesday at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, a week after midterm elections in which Republicans failed to win as many seats in Congress as they had hoped.

In a speech broadcast live on US television, Trump spoke to hundreds of supporters in a ballroom decorated with several chandeliers and lined with dozens of American flags.

“In order to make America great again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” Trump told the cheering crowd of donors and longtime supporters.

“I am running because I believe the world has not yet seen the true glory of what this nation can be,” he said.

“We will again put America first,” he added.

Earlier in the day, aides filed paperwork with the US Federal Election Commission setting up a committee called “Donald J Trump for President 2024”.

There is a long road ahead before the Republican presidential nominee is formally selected in the summer of 2024, with the first state-level contests more than a year away. Analysts believe Trump’s unusually early launch may well be aimed at fending off potential challengers for the party’s nomination in 2024, including rising star Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 44, and Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, 63.

But Trump enters the race in a moment of political vulnerability.

He had hoped to launch his campaign in the wake of resounding Republican midterm victories, fuelled by candidates he elevated during this year’s primaries. Instead, many of those candidates lost, allowing Democrats to keep the Senate and leaving the Republicans with a path to only a bare majority in the House of Representatives.

The losses have prompted some prominent Republicans to openly blame Trump for promoting weak candidates who they say derailed the party’s hopes of taking control of Congress.

Trump’s bid to seek his party’s nomination also amid a series of escalating criminal investigations, including several that could lead to indictments.

They include the probe into dozens of documents with classified markings that were seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago and ongoing state and federal inquiries into his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

He is also facing a congressional subpoena related to his role in the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack by his supporters.

Trump has called the various investigations he faces politically motivated and has denied wrongdoing.

The former president’s stint at the White House – between 2017 and 2021 – was one of the most tumultuous in modern US history. He was impeached twice, and his harsh rhetoric, which critics say often veered into explicit bigotry, deeply polarised the country. But despite his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden and the Republicans’s poor showing in the midterms, he remains the most powerful force in his party.

For years Trump has consistently topped his fellow Republican contenders by wide margins in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. And even out of office, he consistently attracts thousands to his rallies and remains his party’s most prolific fundraiser, raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Trump is also a deeply polarising figure.

Fifty-four percent of voters in last week’s midterm elections viewed him very or somewhat unfavourably, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide. And an October AP-NORC poll found even Republicans have their reservations about him remaining the party’s standard-bearer, with 43 percent saying they do not want to see him run for president in 2024.

Trump’s candidacy also poses profound questions about the US’s democratic future. The final days of his presidency were consumed by a desperate effort to stay in power, undermining the centuries-old tradition of a peaceful transfer. And in the two years since he lost, Trump’s persistent — and baseless — lies about widespread election fraud have eroded confidence in the nation’s political process. By late January 2021, about two-thirds of Republicans said they did not believe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020, an AP-NORC poll found.

VoteCast showed roughly as many Republican voters in the midterm elections continued to hold that belief.

Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the 2020 election was tainted. The former president’s allegations of fraud were also roundly rejected by numerous courts, including by judges Trump appointed.

Trump’s presidential bid paves the way for a potential rematch with Biden, who has said he intends to run for reelection despite concerns from some in his party over his age and low approval ratings.

The two men were already the oldest presidential nominees ever when they ran in 2020. Trump, who is 76, would be 82 at the end of a second term in 2029. Biden, who is about to turn 80, would be 86.

If he is ultimately successful, Trump would be just the second US president in history to serve two nonconsecutive terms, following Grover Cleveland’s wins in 1884 and 1892.