At a rally last week, Former President Donald Trump promised “a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.”
The former president has frequently acknowledged his ambitions to retake the White House. And early Tuesday, he shared on his TruthSocial, “Hopefully TODAY will turn out to be one of the most important days in the history of our Country!”
But not everyone is happy.
Some GOP insiders are attacking Trump as a figure of the past, and they’d like to back somebody else in 2024.
“Personalities come and go,” Dave Ball, chair of the Washington County Republican Party in Pennsylvania, told NBC News. “Sometimes you have overstayed your welcome. You’ve got new people, new faces come, and you have to change with the times sometimes.”
The Horn News has reported that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has thrown their weight behind Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., over Trump.
Moderate Republicans still agree with Trump on issues like trade, immigration and election integrity, but they openly doubt Trump’s ability to win.
“Trump will say we’re a bunch of RINOs,” Jim Durkin, GOP leader in Illinois’s state House, told NBC News. “No, we’re Republicans that want to win races.”
Some loyalists still want Trump to run in 2024, but are surprised at the timing.
“Some of Trump’s advisers thought it would have been wiser for him to delay his presidential announcement until after the Georgia Senate runoff,” Axios reported.
On the other hand, some GOP leaders have defended Trump as the clear leader of the party and want Trump to announce his official campaign on Tuesday.
“I think the people who wanted him to delay the announcement were well intentioned, but just didn’t think it all the way through,” an unnamed Trump advisor told Axios. “After announcing his announcement, had he delayed it, he would have gotten destroyed in the media for being weak and probably would have caused him even more long-term damage.”
Senator-elect J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, still supports the 45th president. Vance has credited Trump for his ability to rival the Demcorats’ advantage in fundraising.
“Any effort to blame Trump—or McConnell for that matter—ignores a major structural advantage for Democrats: money,” Vance wrote in The American Conservative.
“The point is not that Trump is perfect. I personally would have preferred an endorsement of Lou Barletta over Mastriano in the Pennsylvania governor’s race, for example,” Vance said. “But any effort to pin blame on Trump, and not on money and turnout, isn’t just wrong.”
“It distracts from the actual issues we need to solve as a party over the long term,” he said. “Indeed, one of the biggest changes I would like to see from Trump’s political organization—whether he runs for president or not—is to use their incredible small dollar fundraising machine for Trump-aligned candidates, which it appears he has begun doing to assist Herschel Walker in his Senate runoff.”
The Horn editorial team