Building up to a “major announcement” Thursday, some speculated that former President Donald Trump might reveal details related to his campaign or even wade into the cases of supporters arrested in the wake of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
Instead, the former president unveiled a pack of digital trading cards in a licensing agreement with no apparent link to his campaign. The NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, cost “only $99 each” and “would make a great Christmas gift,” Trump said.
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It was Trump’s first major move since announcing his 2024 presidential run in a much-hyped affair at his Mar-a-Lago estate last month and prompted bewilderment at what some deemed a new grift.
Others saw a cry for help.
“He doesn’t want to run,” political commentator Stephen Miller wrote on Twitter. “He thinks he has to because he lost, but he doesn’t want to.”
Save for a handful of virtual appearances, Trump has been largely silent since the rollout of his campaign a month ago. Allies surmised that a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club with far-right personality Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and the cleanup that followed had effectively ground operations to a halt.
They questioned Trump’s decision to meet with Ye, whose antisemitic rants and praise for Hitler are well publicized, and why the former president’s aides hadn’t pulled it from the calendar.
Outside allies blamed a lack of oversight on the slip and wondered why Trump hadn’t announced major hires for his campaign to run alongside his post-presidential operations.
And there has been none of the fanfare expected of a campaign newly unleashed.
Instead, “there’s a lot of disarray, confusion, mismanagement, misdirection,” a former adviser told the Washington Examiner.
Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns did not lack for upheaval, nor were they quiet.
“So far, he has gone down from his bedroom, made an announcement, gone back up to his bedroom and hasn’t been seen since except to have dinner with a White supremacist,” an adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign told CNN of the current operation.
Allies have blamed the fallout from the Ye dinner, which continues weeks after the meeting, as Republicans privately urge party leaders to take a more forceful stand.
Yet the clearest indication of Trump’s challenges is the response from other future rivals, which the events of the last month have done little to box out.
When a dozen or so shadow contenders gathered to give speeches at the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas days after the former president’s announcement, even loyalists did not shy from teasing a run of their own.
This drumbeat of pre-campaign positioning has grown louder as Republicans assess the fallout from disappointing midterm results. Trump-endorsed candidates fared poorly, leading to questions about the former president’s ability to lead the party to victory in a general election.
This week, a new Wall Street Journal poll showed Trump trailing Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) by double digits in a hypothetical primary matchup.
Party elders, some close to Trump, have begun to voice their worries publicly.
“I think President Trump faces a real challenge now of convincing the party that he can, in fact, win a general election. And I think that he has a much harder time winning the nomination than people have thought up till now, and that’s part of the — an outcome of this,” former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently told NPR.
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Gingrich, a one-time Republican presidential candidate, said his “advice would be if you’re going to run, run as a candidate looking to the future, run as a candidate of big solutions and big ideas, and run as a candidate of the whole country.”
“You know, don’t run focused on 2020 election results, and don’t run only as a MAGA candidate focused on the right wing of the Republican Party because that’s not going to win,” he added.
