Newsman: Former President Donald Trump is still remaining as the key factor to the republican party future and the leadership. Donald Trump, on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, Sunday, stood to reclaim his role as the Republican Party’s kingmaker in the 2022 midterm elections and positioning himself for a 2024 presidential run. He claimed that republican will win back not only the white house in 2024 but both the house and senate by his supporters in midterm election in 2022.
“It is far from being over,” Donald Trump said. “We will be victorious and America will be stronger and greater than ever before.”
Repeating his a ‘false’ claims that he won the November 2020 election, Trump teased a White House run in four years: “I may even decide to beat them for a third time,” the one-term former President said in his first public remarks since leaving the White House.
During a lengthy speech in which he baselessly claimed that the US has a “very sick and corrupt electoral process” and accused the Supreme Court of failing to “have the courage” to overturn the election on his behalf, he called for a new round of voting restrictions, claiming, falsely, that mail-in ballots and early voting were responsible for Biden’s win. After boasting that it has “been stated” that his endorsement “is the most powerful asset in politics,” Trump closed out his speech by asking supporters to contribute to his political action committees as he hinted about his future plans.
“With your help, we will take back the House, we will win the Senate, and then a Republican president will make a triumphant return to the White House,” Trump said. “And I wonder who that will be. I wonder who that will be. Who? Who? Who will that be? I wonder.”
This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference often looked like the Donald Trump Political Action Conference, an alliance of interests that will permeate the Republican Party for years.
, CPAC delegates wear Make America Great Again hats and display Trump pins. They pose for pictures beside a “Golden Trump,” a fiberglass mold statue of the ex-president painted in gold, holding star-shaped wands and wearing a coat-and-loosened-tie, beach shorts in a U.S. flag motif and flip-flops.
Trump has remained unbowed and unapologetic since the January 6 insurrection, his political capital among Republicans scarcely diminished even after he was impeached for a second time by the US House, with 10 Republican votes, and then acquitted by the US Senate, with seven GOP senators joining Democrats in the vote to convict him.
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On stage Sunday, he named all the Republican lawmakers who voted against him — calling them “grandstanders” — and saving special ire for Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, who he referred to as a “warmonger.”
Trump dismissed any discussion that he was contemplating starting a new political party: “We have the Republican Party,” he said to applause. “It’s going to unite and be stronger than ever before,” Trump said at the gathering, which has served as an audition for other potential Republican presidential hopefuls.
Trump won the straw poll of CPAC attendees when they were asked who they favored as 2024 GOP presidential candidates. But the results suggest that there is interest in other potential candidates. Two polls were conducted, one that included Trump’s name and one that did not. In the straw poll that included Trump, 55% of attendees said they preferred the former President as their nominee for 2024, another 21% fa vored Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, while South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was third with 4%.
In a second poll that excluded Trump, DeSantis was far ahead of the other contenders at the event that took place in his home state. In that poll, 43% of CPAC attendees supported DeSantis, a close ally of Trump. Noem was second with 11%, followed by Donald Trump Jr. at 8%, then former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with 7% each.
The overwhelming majority of CPAC attendees who participated in the gathering’s informal surveys said they approved of the job that Trump did as president. But only 68% said they wanted him to run again in 2024; 15% said they don’t want the former President to vie for the GOP nomination and 17% said they were unsure — indicating the opening for a fresh face within the party.
Foreshadowing Trump’s influence on the 2022 races, McCarthy lavished praise on Trump during a Saturday panel at CPAC, crediting him with Republicans’ better-than-expected showing in the 2020 House races: “We got closer than anybody thought we could get… No one said we’d win seats,” McCarthy said of GOP efforts to win the majority last November. “But this is the little secret. You know why we won that? President Trump worked on all these races.”
In filings with the Federal Election Commission Saturday, Trump also expanded his potential reach by converting both his presidential campaign committee, Donald J. Trump for President, and his leadership PAC, Save America, into two political action committees that can support other candidates for office.
Though polls showed a dip in Trump’s support after the Capitol insurrection, his approval ratings among Republicans have since rebounded. Three-quarters of Republicans said they wanted to see Trump play a prominent role in the GOP going forward, according to Quinnipiac University Poll released earlier this month, even though 68% of Americans said the former President did not do enough to stop the insurrection.
