After stoking speculation Monday that he would use an Ohio campaign rally to launch his 2024 presidential bid, former President Donald Trump did not unveil his political plans — but he did set a date for a likely campaign launch next week.
“I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15th, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” Trump said at an election eve event in Dayton.
Trump said he did not want to take away from the midterm elections on Tuesday by specifying what the announcement would entail.
“We want nothing to detract from the importance of tomorrow,” he said.
Trump spent much of the more than an hour he spoke onstage relitigating controversies and airing grievances from his presidency, including the fruitless FBI investigation of Russian collusion allegations and the 2020 election results. He withheld mention of his announcement date until near the end of his lengthy speech.
The former president did, however, earlier in the night allude to the prospect of Republicans winning back the White House in the next cycle — the closest he came to confirming that he intends to run again.
“In 2024, most importantly, we are going to take back our magnificent White House,” Trump said after also using the word “we” to describe GOP efforts to retake the House and Senate this year.
Trump had arrived in Dayton primarily to campaign for Senate candidate J.D. Vance, whom he endorsed in the state’s crowded primary.
Alluding at one point to Vance’s dominant position in the polls — the GOP candidate leads Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan by 8 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls — Trump joked that he wasn’t even needed in the state.
“What the hell am I doing here?” he quipped before pantomiming a quick exit from the stage. “We can just make this a quickie.”
Trump said Vance “won’t be owned by me” if elected to the Senate, stressing that Vance would be “independent” from the “establishment” as a senator.
But much of his time in the spotlight on election eve was dedicated to his familiar complaints about the media, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and the Democrats who twice voted to impeach him from office.
Two of Trump’s adult children and their spouses attended the rally on Monday evening, reinforcing expectations that the former president would use his platform to announce another attempt to claim the White House.
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Trump riffed extensively on his unfounded allegations of voter fraud in 2020, taking repeated shots at Pennsylvania leaders who have warned that their state’s ballots could take days to count.
His allusion to a political announcement next week is likely to scramble other Republican presidential hopefuls, many of whom will have little time to pivot from the midterm election to a presidential campaign in time to deny Trump significant time enjoying the GOP primary field all to himself.
Nov. 15, the date of Trump’s announcement, is also the publication date of former Vice President Mike Pence’s memoir.
