DONALD Trump made his first official speech in three months over the weekend, capturing the headlines with a hint that he will run for the White House again in 2024.
The former president also made headlines for all the wrong reasons – social media in the US went into overdrive after footage emerged which appeared to show he made his speech with his trousers on backwards.
It was apparently a trick of the lighting, but the speculation ended up causing more traffic on Twitter and Facebook than the speech itself.
Trump was speaking at a Republican convention in Greenville, North Carolina, billed as the first of a summer of appearances aimed at ensuring his control of the Grand Old Party stays in place ahead of the mid-term elections for the Senate and House of Representatives next year.
Having caused a serious row with his demand that China make reparations to the world for alleged “lab-created” coronavirus, major networks backed off from covering his speech, with both CNN and Fox News refusing to cover it live.
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His hint at a 2024 run came as he said: “We are going to win North Carolina’s all-important US Senate race and lay the groundwork to make sure Republicans carry the great state of North Carolina in a year I look forward to, 2024.
“We are going to do numbers you have never seen before. I stand before you today confident that the people of North Carolina will decisively reject Joe Biden and the radical Democrats.”
With his daughter-in-law Lara Trump having decided against running for the Senate in North Carolina, Trump gave his “complete and total” endorsement to Congressman Ted Budd.
The former president also made comments on last year’s US presidential election: “Our country is being destroyed before our very own eyes, crime is exploding, police departments are being ripped apart and defunded.
“They [Democrats] are vicious, they are violent, in many cases they hate our country and they have bad policy, but the bad newsroom out standpoint is they stick together, that is the one thing they have.
“We are going to have a tremendous 2022 like we did frankly in 2020, more votes than any sitting president in the history of the US.
“We had a great election, bad things happened but we had great election.”
It was business as usual for the former president, who criticised Dr Anthony Fauci as “not a great doctor”, and said the country’s top coronavirus adviser has been “wrong on every issue”.
The New York-based criminal investigations into his company are all part of the “witch hunt” and a “hoax”, he said, and added: “They’ll never stop until November 2024.”
He said: “We are going to take back our country and take it back at a level that is very good for our country and our citizens, we cannot let bad things happen to our country and bad, bad things are happening to us, perhaps like never before.”
In a video message for the Republicans, Trump said: “We’re gonna take back the Senate, take back the House, we’re gonna take back the White House, and sooner than you think. It’s going to be really something special.”
Meanwhile, a growing number of his party are working out ways of removing his influence.
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