Donald Trump opened his electoral campaign for the 2024 presidential elections on Friday with accusations of corruption against Joe Biden and his son Hunter. He did so in a somewhat shorter intervention than usual, and before only about 500 people, at the Columbia Government House, the capital of South Carolina.
The Republican leader repeated the theories that his faithful in the House of Representatives and the right-wing media have been launching around an alleged link between the papers found in the garage and the president’s house in Wilmington and the investigations and accusations that have yet to be proven. about alleged illicit business of his son Hunter in China or the Ukraine.
Trump maintained that this, that of Hunter Biden, is indeed an important case. And not the one that continues against him for taking more than 300 secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago residence, one hundred of which had to be confiscated by the FBI last August.
Thus, the former president alluded to the computer that the FBI intervened in Hunter Biden in 2019, to ensure that the content discovered there “exposes a case of massive corruption like no one has seen before.” But the feds, who received the device from a repair shop where the then vice president’s son had gone, “convinced the media it was all hogwash,” he added.
The FBI -he continued- “told the press: ‘Don’t believe that, it’s disinformation. We’re going after Trump, we’re going after Trump, Trump, Trump.’
“And now they just announced that the Wilmington house – Joe Biden’s vacation home where classified documents surfaced – was used as Hunter Biden’s office to deal with foreign countries,” he added.
The rest of the speech in South Carolina consisted of the usual string of attacks on Biden and the “radical and Marxist” Democrats who, according to him, are determined to keep the borders open for all the drugs in the world to enter, as well as to protect delinquents and confusing children with gender identity issues.
“We are going to end the free reign of violent criminals in Democrat-run cities. We are going to stop the racists and left-wing radical perverts who are trying to indoctrinate our youth, and we are going to get their Marxist hands off our children. We are going to defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, called men and women. We are not going to allow men to play women’s sports,” Trump promised.
Faced with those outside and within his party who found his presentation as a presidential candidate weak and convincing, last November, Trump said that he is “more pissed off and committed to this than ever.” He was at a Republican Party rally in Salem, New Hampshire, ahead of the South Carolina campaign launch rally.
The state governor, Henry McMaster, and Senator Lindsey Graham, among other local figures, attended this rally in their support. But other senior officials preferred not to attend. They did not want to snub the territorial leaders who are believed to rival Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries, in the case of former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley or Senator Tim Scott.
The great paradox is that the more competitors present themselves in these primaries, the more chances the former president will have of winning them, due to dispersion in the alternative vote to his candidacy.
Trump is not at his best, but any bet against him remains risky.
