Trump says he’s made a decision on whether to run in 2024
Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday he had made up his mind about whether he would seek to regain the White House in 2024, but declined to actually say whether he would launch yet another presidential campaign.
“You’re not going to answer, but I have to ask,” Fox News host Sean Hannity told Trump at a town hall event in Edinburg, Texas.
“Where are you in the process, or — let me ask you this, without giving the answer … have you made up your mind?”
“Yes,” Trump responded, generating applause from the friendly audience.
“I think you got it right,” Hannity told the crowd, referring to their presumption that the 45th president would enter the 2024 presidential sweepstakes.
Trump has laid the groundwork for a potential run in conventional and unconventional ways in recent months.
He addressed the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida this past February and has held or is planning to hold campaign-style rallies in the battleground states of Florida, Georgia, Ohio and North Carolina.
The former president has also continued to rail against the 2020 election result, insisting without evidence that the outcome was fraudulent and taking aim at onetime political allies like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and former Attorney General Bill Barr.
On Wednesday, Trump railed against McConnell again, saying the Kentuckian “can no longer do the job.” He also lashed out against “RINOs” (“Republicans in name only”) and “weak Republicans” in Washington, comparing the $1.2 trillion infrastructure deal announced last week by President Biden to the 1938 Munich Agreement that is seen as a low point in appeasement of Nazi Germany.
“They walk into the White House — I’ve been watching for four weeks now — they walk in, they meet Biden, he doesn’t know what the hell’s happening,” Trump said. “They meet Biden … And finally, they walk out, they have a deal, and the deal is a terrible deal. But it’s a deal, and it sort of reminds me of England a long time ago, ‘We have a deal, we have a deal.’ You remember the deal they made with Germany? Not too good.”
“So, they have a deal,” the former president added, “and then Biden canceled the deal, because the radical left said, ‘You can’t make that deal; that deal’s no good. We want to spend $6 trillion.'”
Earlier Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reiterated her insistence that the House will not consider the bipartisan bill unless the Senate passes the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan legislation first. Senate Democrats would be able to pass the larger bill with 51 votes through the parliamentary procedure of reconciliation, provided all 50 members of their conference are on board and enable Vice President Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate, to break a presumptive 50-50 tie.
Trump traveled to Texas Wednesday to accompany the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, on a tour of the US-Mexico border region. During his visit, the former president hammered the Biden administration’s immigration policies, which Republicans have blamed for a surge in people attempting to cross the border illegally.
“We had the tightest security. You could come into our country legally,” Trump told Hannity. “But you know what else we were stopping? Massive amounts of drugs, human traffickers, bad, bad people, criminals; they’re emptying their jails into our country. You know, other countries are emptying their jails into our country.
“We never had it better, and now we’ve never had it worse, in the history of our country.”