So, Is Trump Really Toast, or What?
Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president—like, for the term that would start in January 2025—on Tuesday night at his Mar-a-Lago resort/home/country club thing in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The affair has been widely described as not the most exciting event that Trump has ever held; Fox News actually cut away from him while he was still talking. Held in a ballroom and largely read from a teleprompter, his speech had the grocery-list structure and tone of a normal campaign announcement or State of the Union–style address.
This made for some incongruity, as the conventions of the form required that Trump contrast his presidential term with Joe Biden’s, and do so by describing his time in charge as a distant golden age that was followed by a long Biden-dominated darkness. In fact, however, Trump was still president basically five minutes ago, Biden just got done signing the last few elements of his first-term agenda into law, and the Democratic Party was largely returned to power in the midterms—in part, arguably, because the most noteworthy and backlash-causing political news events of the past two years were the Jan. 6 riot and the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, for which voters generally blame Republicans rather than Democrats.