Trump looking ‘beyond seriously’ at 2024 run

Former President Trump in an interview broadcast late Monday teased a run for the White House in 2024 but declined to give a definitive answer on if he has made the decision to pursue the Oval Office for a second time. 

“Are you running again in 2024? What are the odds?” Fox News Host Sean Hannity asked Trump during the hourlong interview from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. 

“I got tremendous numbers. Nobody has ever gotten the numbers I got. No sitting president has come even close. There’s more popularity now then there was the day before the election because they see how bad things are at the border,” Trump said. “They see what’s going on. They see that their guns are going to be gone, their Second Amendment. Their taxes are going up. Regulations are going through the roof. Jobs are going to go out.” 

Trump suggested the effects of President Biden’s policies on the lives of the American people are “going to take a little while to show” but predicted that  voters will be ready for change when it comes time to vote for another president. 

“But if they add all these regulations back, the jobs are going to be gone. Your energy independence is going to be gone,” he said. “So I say this, I am looking at it very seriously, beyond seriously. From a legal standpoint, I don’t want to really talk about it yet, it’s a little too soon.” 

Trump maintains that the 2020 election was not conducted fairly, alleging without evidence that widespread voter fraud led to a “rigged” election against him. 

He was impeached twice by the House during his first four years in office, once for a conversation with the president of Ukraine that Democrats said amounted to a shakedown of a foreign leader for damaging information on a political rival, and a second time for what critics said was his inciting of a violent insurrection against the government just days before leaving office earlier this year. He was acquitted in both of his Senate trials.

The former president has criticized Republicans who have shot down his claims of voter fraud and rejected his policies.

“Should this now be the Republican Party agenda?” Hannity asked Trump of his “America First” set of ideas.

“If they want to win, yes,” Trump replied. “We’ve expanded the Republican Party. You’ve seen. I mean, the Texas border, we have the biggest Hispanic vote since — as the governor said to me, he called me up, great governor, he said since Reconstruction. I said, you’re talking about Civil War, right? He said, since Civil War. If you want to win and win big, you have to do that. You have to do it.” 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was critical of Trump as he left office, blaming him for the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and suggesting the former president has not escaped potential prosecution for crimes he may have committed while in the White House. 

Trump responded by threatening to back primary candidates challenging vulnerable Senate Republicans. 

“Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again,” Trump said earlier this year. Weeks later, he called McConnell a “dumb son of a bitch” during a speech at a wedding at his club.