President Joe Biden’s Democrats moved closer to retaining control of the US Senate on Friday, as Donald Trump prepared to announce his bid for the White House in 2024.
Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won re-election in Arizona, three television networks announced. His win gives Democrats 49 Senate seats, one short of a majority, with votes still being counted in Nevada and a Dec. 6 runoff in Georgia.
If the two parties split the remaining two seats, Democrats would retain control of the Senate because Vice President Kamala Harris would cast the tie-breaking vote.
Kelly’s Republican opponent, Black Masters, did not immediately concede defeat in Arizona, and late Friday, Trump posted on his social media account that some voting machines in Arizona were not working and the result was “a scam and voter fraud.” Yes… re-election!
Trump will announce next week that he is taking another shot at the White House presidency in 2024, his longtime adviser Jason Miller said Friday.
The divisive former president, who will be 78 at the time of the next election, is hinting at another presidential run as he campaigns for Republican candidates ahead of this week’s midterm elections, saying on Tuesday that he is a “huge will announce.
“President Trump is going to announce on Tuesday that he’s running for president,” Miller told former Trump aide Steve Bannon on his popular “War Room” podcast.
“It will be a very professional, very buttoned-up announcement,” he added.
Miller said Trump told him, “No questions asked, of course I’m running.”
Trump’s candidacy would mark his third shot at the presidency, including his loss to Joe Biden in 2020. After the defeat, he promoted unsubstantiated claims of fraud, including an unprecedented riot at the US Capitol in Washington.
Seats Were Flipped
Trump’s big announcement in Florida comes after disappointing runs by several candidates he supported in the midterms.
Some of his handpicked favorites even lost Republican-held seats to Democrats.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped a highly prized U.S. Senate seat with continued attacks on Trump-backed celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has never held public office before and lives mostly in New Jersey.
Trump hoped to ride a Republican “red wave” that would propel him to another presidential run, but the party fared less than he had predicted.
With 211 seats up so far, Republicans appear poised to win a slim majority in the 435-seat House of Representatives. However, control of the Senate could come down to a Dec. 6 runoff in the southeastern state of Georgia.
The former president’s major media ally — the powerful empire of conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch — even turned on him in the run-up to the election.
Pointing to the party’s disappointing midterms, the Wall Street Journal, the flagship of Murdoch News Corp., declared in an editorial Thursday that “Trump is the Republican Party’s biggest loser.”
The cover of the tabloid New York Post depicted Trump on a precarious wall as “Trumpty Dumpty” who had a “tremendous fall”.
Nevertheless, more than 100 Republican candidates challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election won their respective races.
Trump’s early entry into the race was designed to fend off possible criminal charges over the acquisition of top-secret documents from the White House, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol last year by his supporters. has gone
It may also be aimed at undermining his main potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who emerged as the biggest winner in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Trump is still tangling with a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Earlier Friday, his lawyers challenged a subpoena from the committee, saying Trump had “absolute immunity” and would not testify next week.
The lawyers said in the lawsuit that the subpoena is “improper, illegal and unenforceable,” because Trump is “absolutely immune from being compelled to testify before Congress … about his actions as head of a neighboring branch of government.” About.”
