Trump kicks off his 2024 campaign with a show of support in South Carolina

COLUMBIA, South Carolina – The second floor of the South Carolina statehouse is a study in deep historical contradictions. A full plaque engraved with the state’s resolution to secede from the Union in 1860 faces a portrait of Mary McLeod Bethune. A statue of John C. Calhoun stands far from where Nikki Haley announced that Tim Scott would be the first Black senator since Reconstruction and where he, years later, finally removed the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol.

It’s also the place where Donald Trump tries to pass himself off as an incumbent and a rebel when he’s not.

In the first public event since announcing the 2024 presidential campaign, the former president struggled to achieve the synthesis of the anti-establishment impulse that helped him hold the presidency in 2016 or the air of total control and inevitability that led him to avoid serious problems. the main challenge in 2020 despite colossal midterm losses – and the first is two impeachments.

Introducing Trump, Rep. Russell Fry first stated, “Never before in the history of a South Carolina primary has a presidential candidate received this much support so early in the day.”

More than a year before the primary, Trump revealed the support of state governors, lieutenant governors, senior senators, and three of the six Republican members of Congress. That would be an impressive lineup of endorsements for the would-be rebel. When Trump was endorsed by Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster in 2016, it only made national headlines. However, Trump is not a political outsider: He is a former president. If he goes to any state before his 2020 re-election bid where half of the congressional delegation does not show up, he will be considered weak.

The question is how to interpret what the current political power of the former president is. No former defeated president has made a comeback bid since Grover Cleveland, whose controversial support for lower tariffs than, say, inspired an attack on the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn a presidential election. Other Republicans, of course, see Trump as vulnerable. It is shown how he appears in places with political interests for potential competitors like Nikki Haley or Tim Scott and when other potential competitors like Ron DeSantis are around.

Joe Wilson, the state’s longtime Republican congressman, told Vox that Trump is “stronger” than he was in 2016 as he faces the last competitive primary in the Palmetto State. Wilson, who supports Trump, thinks that the former president has “for real” based on his record in the White House and mentioned what he “did for our country for jobs, economic development, national security, for the military. , to the courts.”

The challenge is whether Trump can recapture the magic that helped propel his unprecedented 2016 presidential campaign. His speech was a mix of bellicose rhetoric from a teleprompter with various Trumpian riffs in which he briefed the audience on topics like the treatment of Taliban dogs and the fact that he, a millionaire real estate developer, is no cook.

It also shows the contradictions the campaign faces. He started with the denunciation of “RINOs” while standing next to Senator Lindsey Graham, a comparative moderate in the modern Republican party – the kind of Republican Trumps need to win the nomination again. Graham was then booed by the crowd because he did not accept Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. Trump then blamed electric cars next to McMaster who had pushed South Carolina’s auto industry to become an EV manufacturing hub.

Earlier in the day, Trump spoke at the New Hampshire State GOP convention. There, the former president tried to strengthen his commitment to the race after not campaigning publicly for months, telling the crowd, “I was angrier and more committed now than I was” in typical Trump fashion. stemwinder of the type of former president often sent in 2016.

The only question is how committed he is to the nearly two years left in the 2024 campaign. The former president is not a television personality who can freely bombard everyone from elected officials to Rosie O’Donnell based on his mood and promises that his real estate expertise which many say can solve all problems.

But he is also not a powerful president of the United States with all the resources at his disposal. Trump is caught in the middle without a yardstick to measure how well he’s doing or precedent to give him perspective. However, he must navigate the maze of contradictions where it is hard to say just what Trump is or how he fits in, save, of course, the fact that no one is confused with Grover Cleveland.