Former US president Donald Trump once against teased a possible third run for the White House in 2024 while addressing his first political rally on Saturday since leaving the White House.
He lashed out at his successor, President Joe Biden, and reiterated false claims about losing in a rigged 2020 election.
“We won the election twice and it’s possible we’ll have to win it a third time. It’s possible,” Trump said at the rally in Wellington, Ohio, a state he won comfortably in 2016 and 2020.
He lost the overall election in 2020, but continues to call it a victory and the reference to possible success in 2024 a “third time”.
Trump hasn’t yet announced his intention to run again, but has hinted it several times, signaling that he is not prepared yet to end his unconventional tryst with US politics.
He is seeking to tighten his grip on the Republican Party as its strongest and most popular leader around, disbursing endorsements to supporters and punishment to recalcitrant Republicans who have either opposed him, criticised him or voted to impeach him.
Saturday’s rally was intended, among other things, to support Max Miller, a former Trump White House aide who is challenging sitting Republican member of the House of Representatives Anthony Gonzalez, one of the 10 Republican congress members who voted to impeach Trump for the January 6 Capitol riot.
Trump has vowed to campaign against all 10 in the 2022 elections in which Republicans are seeking to wrest both chambers of congress – the Senate and the House – from Democrats who control them now with razor-thin majorities.
They are evenly matched in the Senate, where US vice-president Kamala Harris’s tie-breaker vote gives Democrats the edge.
“We will take back the House, we will take back the Senate, and we will take back America, and we will do it soon,” Trump said at the rally.
Trump portrayed his successor, President Biden, as weak and as someone who is endangering America’s strength and compromising its advantages abroad by returning to the agreements he had walked out of – such as the Paris accord on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal, among others.
