Donald Trump, the “stubborn”, candidate for the third time. But he is more and more alone

Donald Trump is back. Do you really want to remake the president of the United States to restore a good standard of living for Americans, as you say, or a strategy to defend yourself? Or avoid having to defend yourself, from the numerous investigations, policies in Parliament and judicial proceedings in Justice, which have been hanging over your head since the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, difficult to forget and to justify due to its gravity, the cross accusations of fraud and tax evasion?

Melania is with him, Ivanka is not. His wife, constantly on the run from her marriage to the billionaire, is by his side. The daughter, who along with her husband Jared Kushner played leading roles in Trump’s four years in the White House, distances herself. “I love my father, he declared after the announcement of his return to the field, but at this stage I prefer to dedicate myself to my family and I have no intention of getting involved in politics.” A few days before, she had posted a very affectionate photo while the former US president was her golf instructor: this is the relationship she wants to have with him, nothing more. Perhaps precisely so as not to end up overloaded with investigations. Just as the extended Trump family gathered throughout the last weekend in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, for the wedding of the penultimate daughter of the tycoon, Tiffany, had with his second wife, Marla Maples. It is, therefore, in this festive atmosphere that the decision to announce the new race for the White House, the third, took place.

An event also organized at the residence in Miami, with guests mostly friends, future employees and mutual supporters. As of 2016, the location has changed, which was then the Trump Tower in New York, and almost all contributors have changed.

Even the strategies for the electoral campaign of the first Republican primaries and the voting for the 2024 presidential elections will be defined in a “vacation” atmosphere. And in fact, beyond the names of those who support him, the themes on which Trump will insist will be very similar to those of the past: making America great again, this time also adding the adjective “glorious”, the accusation against President Joe Biden not only for having “stolen” the 2020 elections but also for having weakened the nation economically and psychologically, with the price of gasoline rising alarmingly with him despite the United States being a producer of fossil fuels and the cost of this has never been a problem, with the southern border of the country that has become a “sieve” with a relative “invasion” of migrants and drugs, and with security in American cities that is no longer guaranteed to citizens.

Nothing new under the sun, with the main American television stations which, not finding news of particular interest in the speech, cut it and broadcast it for just a few minutes. Not just Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, which publicly criticized Trump’s decision to run again and therefore will not support him with its television channels as it did during his tenure (note well, not during the 2016 election campaign, but only after his victory in the polls), but also CNN and MSNBC which, while Trump was speaking from Florida, were broadcasting interviews with new Democratic deputies and senators elected in the midterm elections. The editors’ reasoning is that in recent years they themselves have given Trump’s rallies ample space, offering him free advertising space.

The feeling of abandonment towards Trump is not only from the media, which has always opposed him, but also from the Republican Party itself, of which he is expected to become the main candidate in 2024. Many expected him not to run again or wait launch his re-election. -appointment, instead he stubbornly went ahead. «Stubborn» is precisely the adjective most in vogue among Republican congressmen in relation to the former president. However, there is no alternative candidate.

The strongmen of the American right would like the newly re-elected governor of Florida, Ron De Santis, to run for the White House. But if it is true that the latter registered, unlike the candidates supported by Trump, a great electoral success in last week’s mid-term classes, based on the polls that circulate secretly and in which the former president strongly trusts, this great consensus would be limited to Florida while the Trump consensus is homogeneous in the United States. Being elected to the White House – that’s the bottom line – is a completely different thing from being confirmed governor of a state, even as important as Florida. And it is the same Ron De Santis who refrained from commenting on Trump’s reappointment, letting the press filter that his commitment at this moment is all of the State that reconfirmed him in command and that the ex-president’s movement does not change in any way your agenda. An implicit confirmation of the intention to dream big.

In the meantime, he observes, he honors the vote of voters who have just renewed their confidence in him and hopes Trump gets burned. There is still more than a year to go, which in politics is an eternity. And it is precisely this timing that surprised those who know Trump well: in 2016 he won thanks to a campaign of just twelve months that made his trip look like a very successful trip and which, to say in business terms, required relatively little investment and generated a very high yield. This time, the relationship between effort and result is reversed. If it was a business, he probably wouldn’t have started it. But politics, as we know, is another story and even the most cynical businessmen lose their sense of comfort and profitability. As for historical precedents, no president has re-candidated for the White House after losing the elections for a second term, therefore, after four years of forced stoppage. Democrat Grover Cleveland did this in 1893. Never underestimate Trump and consider defeated people like him.