Trump told aides last week that he can’t wait to launch another presidential campaign as early as this month to capitalize on President Joe Biden’s increasingly dismal poll numbers and turn the spotlight on potential GOP rivals. But his desire to speed up the campaign announcement — abandoning earlier plans to wait until after the midterm elections in November — deepened even more after former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson raised serious questions in a televised congressional hearing this week about Trump’s conduct. in the final months of his first term, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Some Trump allies have privately acknowledged that the House committee’s public hearings have turned out to be more damaging than expected, as congressional investigators continue to release excerpts of sworn testimony from current and former Trump advisers that undermine his false allegations about the 2020 election and raise new questions about his potential legal jeopardy.
The hearings also clearly weighed on Trump, who spent most of a 90-minute speech to evangelical conservatives last month complaining about them and who released more than a dozen posts on his Truth Social website this week aimed at undermining Hutchinson’s credibility .
In recent days, some of Trump’s advisers have reached out to his closest allies to let them know the former president is seriously considering an earlier-than-expected announcement. One GOP source familiar with the talks was told that Trump is considering announcing as soon as the first week of July, while others in his orbit cautioned that he doesn’t currently have the infrastructure in place to make a major campaign announcement and “doesn’t want to this is bullshit,” as a person close to Trump described it.
Another source said Trump was unlikely to make an announcement without alerting the press to ensure maximum coverage.
At one point, members of Trump’s team had discussed a potential early July event in Michigan — a critical midterm battleground and beyond — that sparked internal speculation as a possible venue for his campaign announcement, but the event was canceled before any serious planning began.
Multiple sources, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly about narrow discussions, likened the environment surrounding Trump’s 2024 decision to his first presidential campaign in 2016 — chaotic and disorganized with little understanding of who, besides Trump himself, was in charge .
“Every day is different. We’re being told he’s going to make an announcement soon and this afternoon that changed,” said a source familiar with the matter.
A person close to Trump, who previously said the former president would wait until after Labor Day to throw his hat in the 2024 GOP primary, reversed his position earlier this week, saying, that the September announcement is already “up in the air” and that if Trump makes an announcement early, “it will be July.”
“He’s been sounding a lot more committed lately,” another person close to Trump added.
Before heading to Mar-a-Lago earlier this summer for his Bedminster, N.J., club, Trump insisted to those around him that he would make an announcement before November’s midterm elections. He then reversed course just weeks later, telling allies he didn’t want to interfere in the midterms and felt he could gain more momentum by waiting to announce after the election — assuming Republicans returned the majority in the House of Representatives, as they are favored do.
Three sources described Trump as flustered and reactive whenever talk of a future run arose.
He is vacillating between concerns about the investigations he faces and a desire to “fight fire with fire,” as one source put it, knowing that as soon as he launches a new bid for the White House, he’ll likely get the airtime he’s been hoping for. , that he needs to be his best defender. Although the former president has given dozens of interviews since leaving office, most have been with authors of as-yet-unpublished books or right-wing media with limited reach.
The absence of any Trump-supporting Republicans on the House panel investigating Jan. 6 only exacerbated his desire to shift attention to himself — possibly by launching a presidential campaign. Without any representation on the committee, Trump allies have not been able to question witnesses in real time or preemptively respond to testimony. That dilemma was on full display this week when Hutchinson, a 26-year-old former aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, gave detailed testimony detailing the warnings that Trump and his top aides received up to 6 January and his response – or lack thereof – that day. The hearing was announced with only 24 hours’ notice, while Hutchinson’s identity as a living witness expired at the eleventh hour.
“He knows it if he announces [a run for president] he’s going to be center stage again,” giving him an opportunity to compete in the hearings, one source told CNN.
But others say Trump’s main motivation for announcing his candidacy so early is because of the other potential Republican presidential candidates vying for the nomination. Top Republicans such as Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rick Scott of Florida, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence have made recent stops in early voting states and are laying the groundwork for their own potential campaigns.
One source said Trump “wants to clear the field and challenge other people to run against him.”
Perhaps no potential challenger is more sentimental at this point than Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom Trump has latched onto amid the Florida Republican’s emergence as a hero of cultural conservatism and — according to some of Trump’s own aides Trump – a nicer version of the former president himself.
Through his Save America Leadership PAC, the former president recently pulled examples that are said to demonstrate his strong position in a potential 2024 GOP field.
Trump’s next campaign appearance is scheduled for July 9, when he is scheduled to host a rally for Alaska Republican Senate candidate Kelly Chibaka. While sources close to the former president don’t expect it to be the vehicle to launch the campaign, they haven’t ruled out a surprise post on his Truth Social site that could drive the 2024 GOP primary.
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