Former US President Donald Trump has signaled a possible disaster for the Republican Party, floating a suggestion that he might divide conservative votes in the 2024 presidential election by running as a third-party candidate.
Trump shared an article this week on his social media platform, Truth Social, that called for him to launch a third-party campaign if Republican leaders don’t support his 2024 bid to reclaim the White House. The article, which was published on Tuesday in a conservative journal called American Greatness, argued that Republican leaders intend to defy the will of voters by blocking Trump from winning the party’s presidential nomination.
“They’d rather lose an election to the Democrats, their brothers in crime, than win with Trump,” the article’s writer, Dan Gelernter, said. He argued that even though an establishment candidate would be better than electing a Democrat, caving into such expedient choices has allowed “the uniparty” to control and ruin the country.
“Do I think Trump can win as a third-party candidate? No,” Gelernter said. “Would I vote for him as a third-party candidate? Yes, because I’m not interested in propping up this corrupt gravy-train any longer.”
Trump reportedly flirted with forming his own party in 2021, after losing to Democrat nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. He told Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel that he was “done” with the party, according to ‘Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,’ a book by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl. McDaniel reportedly replied, “You cannot do that. If you do, we will lose forever.” Trump shot back, “Exactly – you will lose forever without me. I don’t care. This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking up for me.”
While Gelernter argued that Trump is the first choice of Republican voters, recent polling suggests otherwise. Republicans still favor Trump’s Make America Great Again policies, but by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 (61%-31%), they want someone else to be the standard-bearer for that agenda in the 2024 election, according to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released earlier this month. Republican voters prefer Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over Trump by a 56-33 margin, the same poll showed.