Donald Trump has announced this Tuesday what will be his third candidacy for the White House, but this time the image he is projecting abroad is very different from that of 2016, when he sought to establish himself as a serious candidate to the disbelief and contempt of some veterans of the Republican Party and his main political rivals.
Unlike on that occasion, his candidacy, which provokes both enthusiasm and fear within his own party, is the favorite, despite the good performance of possible rivals such as the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, and the criticism that now more than ever has begun to surface among Republicans for his unfortunate participation in the last legislative elections.
However, Trump knows what it is to move in a very close primary. In 2016 he did not hesitate to attack with particular virulence the dozen opponents who also intended to be the Republican candidate for the White House, causing perplexity within the party, but the delights of a grassroots constituency that later became his main asset during his tenure.
Trump is confident that the announcement of his entry into the Republican primaries will breathe a new air of enthusiasm into the ranks of a party that had gambled on achieving better results in the mid-term elections by taking advantage of the Biden Administration’s fall in popularity.
Trump’s «big announcement» comes at a time when he also continues to claim without proof that he was the victim of a conspiracy to make him lose the 2020 presidential election. Theories that led to the riots on Capitol Hill and for which a House of Representatives committee, already in the hands of the Republicans, is trying to make him testify.
Under the slogan of making America great again, Trump was able to appeal to that segment of American society known as the ‘angry white man’, the uneducated and strongly conservative working class that blames globalization for all its problems.
«We need someone who will literally take this country and make it great again,» Trump said in the presentation of his candidacy in 2016. During that campaign that claim to put America back ahead was represented in his promises to strengthen the national economy and racist immigration policies.
Like his candidacy, his passage through the White House was also marked by controversy and a style of politics that has spawned imitators among the ultra-right around the world.
Precisely one of the first measures he adopted as soon as he was installed in the Oval Office was to fulfill one of his promises and he banned the entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries until he knew their «intentions» and shortly after he fired the FBI director, James Comey.
That sudden termination was seen by the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, in a subsequent report as a form of possible obstruction of an investigation into alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia to harm his former Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
His years at the helm of the White House will also be remembered for relativizing the dangers of the pandemic and managing to place three conservative justices on the Supreme Court, tipping the balance in favor of the Republicans and setting what will be US policies for decades to come.
But if Trump will go down in history for anything, it is for being the third U.S. president to face impeachment and the first to have to deal with two. One for pressuring Ukrainian authorities to investigate one of Biden’s sons, Hunter, to hurt him in the middle of the campaign and the other for the role he allegedly played in the assault on the Capitol when he asked his supporters to go there to stop the election recount.
FROM MAGNATE AND MEDIA STAR TO PRESIDENT Born and raised in New York, Trump has been married three times and has five children. He has been molded by investments and business resurrections – he has declared bankruptcy for his companies on up to four occasions – until in the 2000s he became a popular face among the public for his television appearances.
It has been in the entertainment industry where he has amassed part of his fortune. From 1996 to 2015 his companies were in charge of holding different beauty pageants and in 2003 he hosted for fourteen seasons an NBC television program called The Apprentice in which contestants competed for a position in the Trump Organization.
By his own account, the network paid him some $213 million while the show was on the air. According to Forbes, his net worth is $2.5 billion. However, despite these figures, according to ‘The New York Times’ he only paid $750 in income taxes in 2016 and 2017, while he went without doing so for at least a decade since 2000.
Throughout his life he had flirted on several occasions with politics — first in the Reform Party, but also with the Democrats before becoming a Republican — but never at the level he did in June 2015 when he announced that he would be in charge of «making America great again».
