Donald Trump grabbed attention on the eve of the election to signal an expected announcement about a new race for the White House as the United States prepares for a midterm vote that polls show could put Congress back control under Republican control.
The former president, who never accepted his defeat in 2020, accentuated suggestions that he would enter the race by 2024.
“Not to detract from tomorrow’s very important, even critical election… I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15 at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” he told a cheering crowd in Ohio. on the eve of the elections, which will determine control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, reports RTE.
The brief mention, at the end of a typically dark and rambling speech, came as President Joe Biden made a final call in an election in which Republicans are in a good position to gain at least partial control of the levers of government.
Even if the Republicans only win the House of Representatives, this would fail Biden’s legislative agenda in the last two years of his first term and could lead to a weakening of US support for Ukraine’s resistance against Russia.
“Our lifetimes are going to be shaped by what happens,” Mr Biden told an enthusiastic crowd at a historically black university in Bowie, near Baltimore, reports RTE.
An influx of far-right Trump supporters in Congress would also hasten the shift taking place within the GOP since the former real estate mogul stunned the world by defeating Hillary Clinton for president in 2016.
Despite facing criminal investigations for seizing top-secret White House documents and trying to nullify the 2020 election, Trump is now using the interim terms to cement his status as the de facto Republican leader and presumptive presidential candidate.
Last night’s announcement was the closest the Republican could get to confirming his intention to run, based on his message last week that he would “will very, very, very probably do it again”, reports RTE.
More than 40 million ballots had been cast in advance, meaning the result was already taking shape before polls opened nationwide today.
Biden tried to remain optimistic during his closing remarks in Baltimore, but yesterday in a phone call with party allies he admitted that his dreams of retaining Congress, which Democrats currently narrowly control, amounted to “very high expectation.”
Biden’s speech exposed what he said was “a choice between two very different visions of America,” arguing that his administration managed to pull the world’s largest economy out of the covid pandemic, with unemployment at 3.75% and manufacturing industries on the rise.
Polls show that Republican messages emphasizing inflation, crime and illegal immigration for four decades have left voters angry. As the party that controls the White House and, if only barely, Congress, the Democrats are likely to be punished.
Returning to the White House, Biden told reporters he believed Democrats would win the Senate, although he admitted “it’s going to be tough” to maintain control of the House.
If the Democrats couldn’t even hold the Senate, then Mr. Biden would be in a state of constant political warfare in Washington. There would also be immediate and hard questions about whether the president, who turns 80 this month, should seek a second term or make way for a younger member of the party.
Mr. Biden’s entire agenda should be frozen. That would raise questions about everything from climate crisis policies, which the president will present at the COP27 conference in Egypt this week, to Ukraine, where Republicans are reluctant to keep up the current pace of US financial and military support.
While insisting on supporting Ukraine’s fight, Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told CNN there could be no “blank check,” a nod to Trump’s isolationist wing of his party and a sign that he could send chills down his spine. in Kyiv.
Adding to the tensions, and a reminder of Russia’s shadowy role in Trump-era US politics, Kremlin-linked oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin boasted that Russia was trying to overturn the outcome.
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