Trump on the field again in North Carolina

Today 09:09

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In his speech to the Republican Party in North Carolina on Saturday night, Trump flirted with the possibility of running for re-election in 2024. But first he will focus on regaining the majority in Congress next year, he said.

“The survival of the United States depends on our ability to elect Republicans at all levels, including the by – elections next year,” he said in a speech that lasted nearly an hour and a half at the annual meeting of local Republicans in Greenville, North Carolina.

New phase meets

The Greenville session appears to be the start of a new phase of rallies and other public events for Trump, who four months after leaving the White House has been barred from reaching out to his followers via social media.

Trump is permanently excluded from Twitter, and on Friday Facebook decided to extend his exclusion for two years.

His advisers are already planning appearances in Ohio, Florida, Alabama and Georgia to back up the candidates Trump chooses to support, and fuel the voters’ enthusiasm.

But some Republicans are worried that Trump-loyal candidates will jeopardize the party’s hopes of regaining a majority in Congress.

While Trump enjoys great support in the party, he is deeply unpopular among other important voter groups. He lost the election last year largely because moderate Republicans in the suburbs left the party.

The daughter-in-law does not pose

In contrast to the huge mass meetings he held in large sports halls while he was president, he spoke to around 1,200 participants at a restaurant table in the conference center in Greenville on Saturday. Several thousand followed the speech that was streamed on the internet.

For a brief moment, he left the stage to his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who is from North Carolina herself. She announced that she will not run for office as a senator in the state next year, as has been rumored.

Immediately after, Trump gave his support to his loyal supporter Ted Budd, one of many candidates for the senatorial election. It was a nod to former Gov. Pat McCrory, who has been critical of Trump’s claims that he actually won the presidential election.

– You can not choose people who have already lost two elections and who do not stand for our values, he said.

False claims

Only towards the end of the speech did Trump address his favorite topic for the time being, namely the election defeat which he called the crime of the century.

Since leaving the White House in January, he has incessantly promoted the unsubstantiated claim that the election was stolen.

The allegation has sparked a wave of proposals to curtail voting rights in a number of Republican-led states, although allegations of cheating have been rejected in nearly 60 lawsuits, by several Republican governors and officials in his own administration and by a number of reports of the results.

Far out towards Biden

Trump used much of his speech to reach out to President Joe Biden, whom he called the most radical left-wing administration in history.

“As we gather here tonight, our country will be razed right before our eyes,” he said.

A spokesman for the Democrats’ National Committee, Ammar Moussa, struck a blow against Trump even before the speech.

“Over 400,000 dead Americans, millions of lost jobs and dangerous careless rhetoric are clearly not enough for Republicans to break with a loser president who cost them the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives,” Moussa said.

While he has had to work harder to be heard, Trump still has full control over the Republican Party. In a recent poll, 66 percent of Republicans said they would like to see him run again, even though the same percentage of all Americans do not want him to run again.