The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has dropped in a campaign rally in Iowa, held with a view to the upcoming midterm elections, that he considers himself to have the "right" to run again for the White House in 2028, claiming that he was "robbed" and "cheated" in the 2020 presidential elections. His words come just hours after the president refused to clarify whether he is willing to support his current vice president, JD Vance, as a possible successor for that same electoral date.
Before his supporters, Trump referred to the Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that sets the maximum of presidential terms at two. "I think the law says that I am not allowed to run again. I have studied that phrase (...) Unfortunately, it is quite concise and there is not much room for maneuver," he admitted at first. Immediately after, he defended that a potential candidacy of his could be justified by what happened in 2020 against Joe Biden: "They cheated us in the second because we won three times. So I think I have the right to run again. I think I have the right to run again because they cheated. They rigged the election."
The presidential elections of 2020, to which the Republican leader refers, were dominated by his persistent allegations of massive fraud. However, federal courts, state authorities, and his own Department of Justice endorsed the cleanliness of the process and dismissed the accusations for lack of evidence. Despite this, Trump has maintained since then the narrative that they took the victory from him, in a climate of political tension that culminated on January 6, 2021, in the assault on the Capitol, when a crowd of his supporters violently stormed the Congress headquarters to try to prevent the official certification of Biden's victory.
Trump dodges giving his support to JD Vance for 2028
Trump's statements about his political future add to the doubts that have settled in the Republican Party regarding the role of his current "number two." Hours before the rally, when questioned by reporters about whether he would support JD Vance in the event that Republicans lost the majorities in the elections on December 3 and he chose to run in 2028, the president responded emphatically: "Where do they get that idea? I haven't even thought about it. We have too much time to be thinking about that. There is still a lot of time."
This evasive attitude had already been manifested days earlier in the Oval Office --with JD Vance himself present-- when the president stated that a possible candidacy of the vice president is a matter they have "never" talked about and that, for now, he considers "irrelevant." In his opinion, the party's attention must be completely focused on facing the imminent midterm elections.
The denials and the lack of explicit support from Trump clash with the expectations that Vance himself had recently fueled. In an interview, the vice president even took for granted that he would receive the president's support "immediately" if he decided to run for the White House, a backing he defined as "the most effective in political history." In that same conversation, Vance tried to shape his own image, even distancing himself from the public support that Trump recently gave to the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.