‘Unfinished business’: Donald Trump kicks off the 2024 US presidential election

Former President Donald Trump began his bid for the 2024 White House with stops in New Hampshire and South Carolina on Saturday, marking the first campaign appearances since he announced his last campaign more than two months ago.

“Together we will complete the unfinished business of making America great again,” Trump said at an evening event in Columbia to introduce his South Carolina leadership team.

Trump and his allies hope that the events in states of immense power in selecting the nominee will be a show of force behind the former president after a slow start to his campaign that left many questioning his commitment to running again.

“They said, ‘He doesn’t hold rallies, he doesn’t campaign. Maybe he lost that step,'” Trump said at the New Hampshire GOP annual meeting in Salem, his first event.

But, he told the audience of party leaders, “I am now angrier and more committed than ever before.” In South Carolina, he further dismissed the speculation saying that “we have huge rallies planned, bigger than ever before.”

Make America Great Again, again

While Trump has largely spent the months since he announced nestled at his Florida club and nearby golf course, his aides insist they’ve been busy behind the scenes.

His campaign opened a headquarters in Palm Beach, Florida, and hired staff.

And in recent weeks, backers have reached out to political operatives and elected officials to rally support for Trump at a critical point as other Republicans prepare their own expected challenges.

In New Hampshire, Trump promoted his campaign agenda, including immigration and crime, and said his policies would be the opposite of President Joe Biden’s.

He cited the Democrats’ move to change the election calendar, which cost New Hampshire its primary spot, and accused Biden, a fifth-place finisher in New Hampshire in 2020, of “despicably destroying this beloved political tradition.”

“I hope you remember that during the general election,” Trump told party members. Trump himself won the primary twice, but lost the state to the Democrats each time.

Later in South Carolina, Trump said he intended to keep the state’s presidential primary as the “first in the South” and called it “a very important state.”

In his speech, he moved from criticizing Biden and the Democrats to disparaging remarks about transgender people, mocking people who promote the use of electric stoves and electric cars, and reminiscing about efforts as president to increase oil production, negotiate trade deals and crack on migration at the US-Mexico border.

Dinners with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers

While Trump remains the only declared 2024 presidential candidate, potential challengers including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations , expects them to launch their campaigns in 2024. the upcoming months.

Trump’s campaign had sparked controversy in its early stages, especially when he dined with Holocaust denial white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who had made a series of anti-Semitic remarks.

Trump was also widely mocked for selling a series of digital trading cards that featured him as a superhero, a cowboy, and an astronaut, among other things.

He is the subject of a series of criminal investigations, including an investigation into the discovery of hundreds of secretly marked documents at his Florida club and whether he obstructed justice by refusing to return them, as well as state and federal investigations into his attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden.

Still, early polls show him a favorite to win his party’s nomination.

“The gun is fired and the campaign season is on,” said Stephen Stepanek, outgoing chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party.

Trump announced that Stepanek would serve as a senior adviser to his campaign in the state.