After returning to Washington on Tuesday after 18 months, Donald Trump delivered a fiery speech and indicated that he could run for president again in 2024.
During his address to the America First Policy Institute, Trump reiterated his false claims that he won the 2020 election and denounced the House committee investigation by his supporters on the US Capitol on January 6 as an act of “political hacks and thugs”. Of.
“I always say I ran the first time and I won, then I ran the second time and I did much better,” Trump said, adding, “We may have to do it again. We have to straighten our country.”
The 76-year-old former US president has held off on announcing his candidacy, but has determined what he believes should be the priorities for the “next Republican president.”
“I look forward to providing many more details in the coming weeks and months,” Trump said.
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He continued, “If I relinquished my beliefs, if I agreed to keep quiet, if I stayed home and just went easy, Donald Trump’s harassment would stop immediately. But I wouldn’t do that.” I can’t. Do that.”
Trump’s 90-minute address echoed many of the themes of his 2016 winning campaign, including illegal immigration and crime.
Mike Pence likely to fight again
Several hours before Trump took the stage at the right-wing America First Policy Institute, his former vice president, Mike Pence, who is also considering running the White House in 2024, addressed a different conservative audience in Washington.
Speaking at the Young America Foundation conference, Pence said Americans should look to the future, not the past, and reduce differences with Trump.
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“Elections are about the future,” Pence said, “I didn’t come here today to look back, but to look ahead.”
‘Cesspool of crime’
Donald Trump has repeatedly lashed out at US President Joe Biden, blaming him for the country’s ills. “We are a nation in decline,” he said. “We are a failed nation.”
“Inflation is the highest in 49 years,” Trump said. “Gas prices have reached the highest level in the history of our country,” he said.
He accused Biden of allowing an “invasion” by the millions of migrants crossing the southern border.
“Other countries very happily send all their criminals to the United States through our open border now,” he said.
“The next Republican president must immediately implement every aspect of the Trump agenda that achieved the safest frontier in history,” he said.
Trump said that America has now become a hotbed of crime.
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“We have blood, death and suffering on a scale once unimaginable,” he said. “Democrat-run cities are setting all-time homicide records.”
He accused Biden of “surrendering Afghanistan” and allowing Russia to invade Ukraine.
“It never, never would have happened if I were your commander-in-chief,” he said.
Since making his last Air Force One flight from Washington to Florida on January 20 last year, Trump has remained the most polarizing figure in the country, citing his unprecedented campaign to sow Biden doubts about his 2020 election loss. has been continued.
Washington has been enthused for weeks during Congressional hearings about Trump’s mob storming the Capitol on January 6 and his attempts to reverse the election.
With Biden’s approval rating currently below 40 percent and Democrats projected to lose control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, Trump is clearly optimistic he can ride the Republican wave into the White House in 2024.
On the Democratic side, anger at Trump is also providing energy in the mid-term.
House committee hearings have provided evidence that Trump saw nothing less than an attempt to sabotage American democracy, first by trying to rig electoral processes behind the scenes and finally on legislators attesting to their losses. encouraged the crowd to attack.
Facing chatter that at 79 he is too old to even think about getting a second term in 2024, Biden says the ghost of another Trump candidacy is one of his main motivations for running again. Is.
After Trump’s speech, the president took a jibe at his predecessor, tweeting: “Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think inciting a mob attacking a police officer is ‘respect for the law’.”
“You can’t be pro-insurgency and pro-police or pro-democracy or pro-American,” Biden said.
(with inputs from AFP)
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