Former President Donald Trump may have been expecting to ride a red wave of momentum toward another White House bid announcement. Now, some members of his party are telling him to hold off.
Trump expressed confidence about the midterm results on election night, but has since called the results “disappointing.” While he saw some wins, some high-profile candidates Trump endorsed floundered.
Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania lost outright. Herschel Walker in Georgia was trailing while heading for a runoff, and Blake Masters in Arizona trails in a race still too close to call. Those results were possibly amplified by Trump’s pre-election promise.
“I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, Nov. 15th at Mar a Lago,” the former president said at one of his last events before Tuesday’s election.
With the speculation about making another White House run public at this point, it’s now being openly questioned by Trump confidants.
Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany recommended holding off until the Georgia Senate run-off is decided.
“I think he needs to put it on pause absolutely,” she said on her Fox News show. “He’ll make that decision, his own decision. If I’m advising anyone, Trump, DeSantis whoever, nobody announces 2024 until we get through Dec. 6.”
In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, retiring Republican Senator Pat Toomey cast some blame on the former president, saying, “I think Donald Trump’s influence gradually but steadily declines, and I think it accelerates after the debacle that he’s responsible for to some degree.”
A Karl Rove op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called some of Trump’s endorsements “knuckleheads” without proper vetting from the former president.
“Here’s my response to Karl Rove, it’s ‘blah blah blah,'” said CBN Chief Political Analyst David Brody.
“The Democrats have been after Trump. The media has been after Trump. The establishment Republicans have been after Trump. It’s the trifecta. They’re trying to spin this as a bad night for Trump,” Brody noted.
Virginia Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears told Fox Business that it was time to move on.
“The voters have spoken, and they have said that they want a different leader. And a true leader realizes when they’ve become a liability and understands that it’s time to step off the stage, and the voters have given us that very clear message,” she said.
The other elephant in the room is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who didn’t need Trump to cruise to a decisive victory.
“Thanks to the overwhelming support of the people of Florida, we not only won the election, we have rewritten the political map,” DeSantis said at his election night party in Tampa Tuesday night.
That puts him in an even stronger position as a potential frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Trump has already nicknamed DeSantis “Ron DeSanctomonious” at a rally before the midterms.
The potential showdown and infighting are already delighting Democrats.
“It’d be fun watching them take on each other,” mused President Joe Biden when asked about Trump and DeSantis at a press conference Wednesday.
Trump took to his social platform Truth Social to say that he was not angry about the midterm results and that he was “very busy looking into the future.”
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