Donald Trump announced last November that he’s preparing a third run for president, but his campaign has been relatively quiet in the more than two months since. In fact, he didn’t hold any major public public events until this weekend.
However, Donald Trump is now officially back on the campaign trail, appearing for a speech in New Hampshire. According to Axios, Trump’s speech “generated little of the excitement that has long defined his glitzy political rallies.”
It was not a full-on rally, but rather an event that was part of the state party meeting in New Hampshire, with around 400 people in attendance, in a high school auditorium.
About one third of the crowd applauded when Donald Trump was introduced.
Donald Trump: 2024 Drama Already?
As reported last year, there was noted resistance to Trump among the Republican Party leadership in New Hampshire, including by Gov. Chris Sununu, a longtime Donald Trump foe.
This could be troublesome for Trump’s ambitions to return to office, as New Hampshire remains the first presidential primary on the Republican side.
Sununu, in fact, even said over the weekend that he is considering running for president himself, which could further cut into Trump’s chances of winning the state.
“Obviously, he started this campaign after the election in ’22,” Sununu said of Trump. “That obviously had a lot of stumbling blocks that he was trying to overcome. He comes to New Hampshire, and, frankly he gives a very mundane speech. The response we have received is: He read his teleprompter, he stuck to the talking points, he went away.”
“I don’t have a timeline,” Sununu said over the weekend about his 2024 plans, in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “I mean obviously folks are talking about it, but I really don’t have a timeline. I’m spending a lot of time nationally trying to grow the party as Republicans, talk to independents, talk to the next generation of potential Republican voters that right now no one is really reaching out to.”
The governor said of the speech that Trump is “not really bringing that fire, that energy, I think that a lot of folks saw in ’16,” judging by his speech.
Other New Hampshire Republicans were also skeptical of Trump’s chances.
“Trump has not been mortally wounded but was damaged by the results in the midterm election,” former Republican state party chairman Wayne MacDonald told Axios. “Trump lost the 2020 election, and the number of people who still hold onto the belief that he didn’t are a dwindling minority.”
Axios added that enthusiasm for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was “notable” at the event, with a life-sized cutout even appearing. The University of New Hampshire’s Granite State poll, last week, found that DeSantis leads Trump 42 percent to 30 percent. Even Sununu, despite his own ambitions, told CNN that he thinks DeSantis could win New Hampshire “right now.”
Trump did announce that he had tapped outgoing New Hampshire GOP Chair Stephen Stepanek to lead his New Hampshire campaign operation.
“If he wasn’t coming with us, I might just have to forget about New Hampshire and just mark it down as a loss. But with Steve, I don’t think we can lose,” he said of the hire, while also promoting that he would return to the state at some point for a bigger rally.
Reuters described the event, and another subsequent one in New Hampshire, as “low-key.”
“I think of the United States. Every day is April Fools Day,” Trump said. “We have open borders when they should be closed,” Trump said in the speech. “It’s April Fools Day. … We have prisons—people from mental institutions and terrorists—being dumped into our country when they should not be accepted. April Fools Day, right? Who would do that?”
The Big Donald Trump Speech: Oh the Problems and Crazy
The speech itself he gave during the event contained numerous factual errors, according to a Time Magazine analysis, which the magazine described as an “hour-long, stream-of-conscious remarks that seemed vamped.”
It started with Trump claiming that he had won New Hampshire in the general election twice. While Trump won the New Hampshire primary in both 2016 and 2020, he lost the state in the general election both times.
He also claimed that other world leaders were “slow to call” President Biden with congratulations, because they didn’t believe he had really won. In fact, the calls started to roll in for Biden once the race was called for him by the networks, five days after Election Day in 2020.
While in New Hampshire, Trump also gave a one-on-one interview to the TV station WMUR.
“Well, it’s very important, and even from the standpoint of tradition and history, it’s so important, and I think what the Democrats have done is terrible because they’ve broken something that’s vital, in my opinion, but the Republicans haven’t done it, I made sure that they didn’t do it and you’re first, we’re going to keep it that way for a long time,” Trump told WMUR, continuing with the stream-of-consciousness theme.
The former president also made some comments on the January 6 attack, and defending those who attacked the Capitol on his behalf.
“Well, I’m not so sure they’ve changed their mind. I think when they see the way there being treated, it’s so badly, patriots are being treated so badly, and they were there to protest an election that was, just a horrible election, a horrible, the way they covered the election, the way the election worked out, it was a disgrace with the mail-in ballots and all of the things that happened, and there are so many different things, and you look at different states, and they were there as a protest, and in many respects, many of them are great patriots,” he said.
And Trump, in the interview, continued to insist that the 2020 election had been “rigged” against him, against all available evidence.
“Ah, certain states there were absolutely rigged, in my opinion, certain states, and I think that comes out. Every week you see more and more evidence of it. They’re looking at many, many things right now,” he said, adding that “court victories have been won,” while court victories have not, in fact, been won.
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“Yeah, it’s very, very sad. We can never let it happen again. We have to have free and fair elections. We should go back to paper ballots because that, you can’t cheat. We have to go back to one-day voting, same-day voting it’s called. We have to get rid as many mail-in ballots as possible. If people are sick or it’s military, far away, but we have to have one-day voting, paper ballots, voter ID, and you’ll never have this problem,” Trump added.
Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic.
