Former President Donald Trump is not ready to make any announcements for a potential 2024 presidential candidate, but he is resolute in saying the Republican Party is not going to stand in his way.
While there is talk of surging Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as a rising star in the party, Trump doubts DeSantis would even challenge him.
“I don’t think I will face him,” Trump told Yahoo Finance in a phone interview. “I think most people would drop out. I think he would drop out.”
Resistance in a Republican GOP primary before 2024 would be futile, Trump predicted, even for DeSantis.
“If I faced him, I’d beat him like I would beat everyone else,” Trump said.
DeSantis and other top GOP governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem are keeping their focus on reelection campaigns in the 2022 midterms.
“I’m not considering anything beyond doing my job,” DeSantis said recently, “we’ve got a lot of stuff going on in Florida.”
Trump was also declining to make any announcements on a presidential campaign.
“I haven’t said that [I would run in 2024],” Trump stressed. “I said that if I do run, I think that I will do extremely well, and I’m looking not only at polls, but I’m look at the enthusiasm that we did a great job.”
Trump lamented the global coronavirus pandemic impacting his 2020 reelection campaign, saying the economy was “really getting ready to rock.”
“We would have rocked it, but then as you know COVID came in from China,” Trump said in the excerpt of the Yahoo Finance interview released Sunday.
