Why Trump's 2024 announcement is dividing Republicans
Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins the Live show to discuss former President Trump’s 2024 White House bid.
Video transcript
[AUDIO LOGO]
- It's official-- former President Donald Trump will take another run at the White House in 2024. He made the announcement at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Take a listen.
DONALD TRUMP: In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States. I will ensure that Joe Biden does not receive four more years in 2020.
- Yahoo Finance senior columnist Rick Newman has a hot take on this one. Rick, so you're watching this last night. What were some of your thoughts?
RICK NEWMAN: Well, maybe there's a new acronym here, Make America Great and Glorious Again. Does that mean MAGAGA or just mean MAGGA? I'm not sure, but I think Trump needs a new spin here because this feels like, obviously, a warmed-over version of 2016 and then 2020.
And I keep seeing when I'm looking at some of the political analysis this morning, I keep seeing the phrase "low energy" used to describe the Trump announcement last night. But we're already getting some revisionist history from Trump. I'd like to just run this clip and let people hear how President Trump describes what he thinks the state of the country was when he left office in 2021. Can we run that?
DONALD TRUMP: Two years ago, when I left office, the United States stood ready for its golden age. Our nation was at the pinnacle of power, prosperity, and prestige, towering above all rivals, vanquishing all enemies, and striding into the future confident and so strong.
RICK NEWMAN: [CHUCKLES] OK, just a little fact checking on that one, Trump left office two weeks after the January 6 riots at the Capitol. Many Americans were shocked to see political violence erupt. And we know from the January 6 Committee that has been holding hearings and doing research into this that Trump himself instigated a lot of that.
When Trump left office, we also-- almost nobody was vaccinated and we were still very near the bottom of the COVID pandemic. So Trump doesn't want us to remember that. And I guess for the next two years, we're going to have dueling versions of what exactly happened during the Trump administration.
- Right, he doesn't want us to remember that multiple people died as well, trying to overflow or overthrow the election results at his request, too. Rick, when we think about what the GOP and their response will be now as well, what does that look like?
RICK NEWMAN: There's a huge difference. And the midterms have brought one really important change to the Republican Party, which is people no longer seem afraid to come out and criticize Trump and tell him it's time for him to step aside. Even going into the midterm elections, I mean, this has been a phenomenon ever since Trump got elected in 2016. There have been many Republicans privately objecting to the way he conducts politics, his nonstop attacks on almost anybody who criticizes him.
And this has all been very quiet and private until just recently we finally are seeing a lot of Republicans publicly saying, look, his time is over. We need to get on with some new candidates here. And that is because Trump has been losing.
So let's just, very quickly to review his record, he obviously had a huge upset win in 2016. But in 2018, he helped Democrats retake the House of Representatives. In 2020, he helped Democrats win the presidency. He also helped them retake control of the Senate in 2022.
He helped Democrats retain control of the Senate. And he almost prevented Republicans from winning control of the House. So Trump now has, I think it's fair to say, a definitive losing record in politics. And people are just looking at the results and saying, I can come out and resist Trump and maybe it's not the kiss of death politically. So I think that tells us we're going to see quite a battle to see who becomes the presidential nominee on the Republican side in 2024.
- And that sentiment starting to make its way to Wall Street as well, as we had heard from Ken Griffin recently. Rick, thanks so much.
