Former President Donald Trump is making a third run at the presidency, he announced Tuesday night.

"America's comeback starts right now," Trump told a crowd gathered at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.


What You Need To Know

  • Former President Donald Trump announced his third run for the presidency on Thursday night, at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida

  • Trump boasted about his successes in office, denigrated the Biden administration, and touted the successes his endorsements made in the 2022 midterms — while sidestepping the significant losses taken by significant Senate and Governor picks

  • Trump will be running under a cloud of legal trouble, including accusations of financial fraud; he also has sued to block his testimony before a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, which started shortly after a rally he headlined

  • Should Trump win, he would be the first president to serve non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland

"In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States," he later added.

Trump’s announcement ends 24 months of speculation after his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden — a loss Trump has falsely blamed on widespread election fraud.

Trump has spent the last two years repeating misinformation about the election, including to his supporters just before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, despite many Republican lawmakers and candidates saying they wanted to shift attention to the future.

Notably, Trump largely steered clear of repeating his fraud claims Tuesday night. He, however, made a passing remark, without evidence, about how “many people think … China played a very active role in the 2020 election” in response to him imposing higher taxes and tariffs on Chinese imports.

Trump’s speech included some of his most common refrains, many of them unproven, if not wholly disproven. The past two years of Biden’s presidency, he said, have been a time of “pain, hardship, anxiety and anger,” blaming Biden for inflation, high gas prices, a Russian invasion of Ukraine that Trump said wouldn’t have happened if he were president, “dangerous” immigrants trafficking “deadly drugs” across the southern border and “blood-soaked” cities that are now “cesspools of violent crime.” He also downplayed the dangers of climate change, saying that “they say the ocean will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years.” (Federal scientists have frequently repeated that sea level rise may approach one foot for most coastlines by 2050.)

Trump said that during his presidency America was a “great and glorious nation." He said his leadership “knocked China back on its heels,” inflation was “nonexistent,” the border was “the strongest ever,” and America was on the path from energy independence to “energy dominance.” Foreign nations, including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, were “held in check” out of their respect for him, Trump said. 

Without re-airing his major grievances about the 2020 vote, Trump vowed to “bring back honesty, confidence and trust in our elections.” He said, if elected again, he would seek to “eliminate cheating” by only allowing paper ballots, requiring same-day voting, mandating voters to show identification and requiring all votes to be counted by election night.

The former president and his allies lost more than 60 court cases challenging the results, and election and law-enforcement officials, including Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, said there was no evidence to support the claims.

Trump also took credit for victories in the 2022 midterm elections, especially GOP control of the House, while downplaying the Democratic Party retaining the majority in the Senate. Rather, he touched on a common catchphrase from his time as a reality show host: Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, he said, has been “fired.”

As of Tuesday night, with a handful of races still being counted, the Republicans were one seat shy of the 218 seats needed to control the House.

Trump also made a few early, eyebrow-raising campaign promises that would drastically alter how Washington operates. He said he would push for term limits for members of Congress, ask for a permanent ban on taxpayer funding of campaigns and a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and Cabinet officials.

During his first run for president in 2016, Trump similarly vowed to root out corruption in D.C., or “drain the swamp.” He, however, nominated several former lobbyists for his Cabinet. And in one of his last orders of business as president in January 2021, he revoked an order he signed early in his term that imposed a five-year lobbying ban for administration officials and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments.

Trump’s announcement comes amid heavy criticism of his influence on the 2022 election — including from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely seen as a strong GOP candidate for 2024, becoming a frequent Trump target in recent days. On his Truth Social media platform, the former president last week rechristened DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious,” and called him an “average governor.” Trump also took credit for DeSantis’ election in 2018, saying that, by sending in the FBI and U.S. attorneys, he “stopped his election from being stolen.”

When asked to comment on Trump’s criticisms earlier Tuesday, DeSantis — without referring to the former president by name — said “what you learn is all that’s just noise. And really what matters is, are you leading? Are you getting in front of issues? Are you delivering results for people?,” adding that “at the end of the day, I would just tell people to go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night.”

Trump will be running under a cloud of legal trouble. He’s currently under federal investigation for allegedly removing thousands of files, including classified documents, illegally from the White House. Federal and Georgia state prosecutors also are examining his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election based on false claims of voter fraud. 

Meanwhile, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot has subpoenaed Trump to testify -- Trump has sued to block the subpoena. And his business, Trump Organization, is currently being tried for criminal tax fraud. The company has pleaded not guilty. 

In addition, New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a civil lawsuit against Trump, his business and three of his adult children alleging they committed financial fraud for years. James is seeking $250 million and to bar Trump and the Trump Organization from conducting any real estate business in New York for five years.

If Trump wins in 2024, he’d become just the second president in U.S. history to serve nonconsecutive terms. The only other president to return to the White House was Grover Cleveland, who lost his bid for reelection in 1888 but won in 1892.

Biden, who is in Indonesia for the G20 summit of international leaders, was in the Hutan Mangrove Forest alongside French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron, when they were asked if they had a reaction to Trump's announcement. 

According to the White House press pool, Biden and Macron "shared the faintest of smirks," before Biden responded, "Not really." Macron stayed silent.

One key member of Trump's previous administration said shortly after his announcement that they will not be a part of his political future: Ivanka Trump, his eldest daughter.

"I love my father very much. This time around, I am choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we are creating as a family," Ivanka Trump, a former White House adviser, wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. "I do not plan to be involved in politics."

"While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena," she added. "I am grateful to have had the honor of serving the American people and I will always be proud of many of our administration’s accomplishments."