Fact check: Trump’s incomplete border wall did not stop unauthorized immigration and drugs. (Published 2022) (2024)

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Trump, ignoring the midterms’ verdict on him, announces a 2024 run.

The decision, which came as votes were still being counted in congressional contests that will determine the balance of power in the House, confronts a frazzled and polarized nation — its social fabric already stressed by forces that the Trump era unleashed and supercharged — with a reboot of the nonstop political reality show that the Biden presidency had promised to cancel.

Mr. Trump’s haste to become a candidate again carries political risk and financial encumbrance, and some advisers had pushed for him to hold off. But he has been eager to announce a campaign since this summer, nearly did so at a rally last week on election eve and told some advisers that he was concerned another delay would signal weakness.

The twice-impeached former president’s view, according to friends and advisers, is that a formal White House bid will bolster his claims that the multiple state and federal investigations he faces are all politically motivated.

Indeed, he hopes that a candidacy could give pause to prosecutors who may be considering criminal charges, particularly in connection with the Justice Department’s investigation into highly sensitive documents that Mr. Trump held at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, according to the friends and advisers, who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

It was at Mar-a-Lago, the scene of that possible crime, that Mr. Trump on Tuesday declared his determination to reclaim the presidency.

“We will make America wealthy again,” he said as he concluded. “We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. We will make America glorious again. And we will make America great again.”

In his rambling hourlong address, Mr. Trump gave an exaggerated picture of his accomplishments before announcing his candidacy. He quickly fell back into his typical rally fare, full of false statements, inflammatory discussion of immigration and crime, and nods to right-wing culture-war issues.

Notably, he did not dwell on his 2020 election loss, though he called for an elimination of all early voting, absentee voting and electronic voting machines. “Only paper ballots,” he said.

And he repeatedly expressed grievance over the ongoing investigations into him and his family, denouncing the F.B.I. search of his property to retrieve documents, among other inquiries. “I’m a victim,” Mr. Trump told the crowd bluntly.

Even though the former president’s dominance of Republican politics has led to three disappointing elections in a row for the party, he immediately claims the mantle of the G.O.P. front-runner, thanks to a devoted, core following of millions of supporters who have repeatedly proved their loyalty to him.

One reason for his haste was to blunt the momentum gathering behind Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose runaway re-election victory last week astonished many inside the party. Mr. DeSantis was already the preferred presidential nominee among a sizable number of Republican donors and elected officials who have tired of Mr. Trump’s control, his continual controversies and his endless harping about 2020.

Still, Mr. Trump’s rush to announce a bid also carries the risk of backfiring. Conservative news outlets, including Fox News and others belonging to the Murdoch empire, have turned against him. The New York Post mocked him on its cover last week as “Trumpty Dumpty,” a day after lionizing the much younger Mr. DeSantis as “DeFuture.” And a Wall Street Journal editorial on Monday denounced him as “the man most likely to produce a G.O.P. loss and total power for the progressive left.”

Some advisers privately warned against an announcement, saying that “Trump fatigue” had contributed to the 2020 defeat, and that voters needed a break after the contentious 2022 election season. Over the weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told several people that he had visited Mr. Trump in Florida and asked that he delay the announcement.

More broadly, Mr. Trump’s insistence on another campaign has set off a roiling debate among Republicans over whether the party can thrive with him as its leader — and, if not, how it can effectuate a divorce. Many party leaders believe last week’s failures showed the folly of Mr. Trump’s obsession with his false claims that he won the 2020 presidential contest.

His handpicked candidates lost close races across the country, including a crushing blow in Pennsylvania, where Democrats flipped a Senate seat and helped ensure that Republicans would remain in the minority for the next two years. (A runoff election in Georgia on Dec. 6 could give Democrats a 51st seat. It remains unclear whether Herschel Walker, the former football star whom Mr. Trump urged to run as a Republican, will want Mr. Trump to campaign with him.)

Mr. Trump endorsed five candidates in the nation’s most competitive House races, according to ratings by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. All five lost.

He was also heavily involved in contests determining who would run the election apparatus in critical states before the 2024 presidential election. The result: Every election denier who sought to become the top election official in a battleground state was defeated.

Mr. Trump and his team raced to do damage control and project strength leading up to Tuesday. They rounded up endorsem*nts from Republican leaders and invited all 168 members of the Republican National Committee to the Mar-a-Lago event, although many were reluctant to attend because of party rules that require neutrality in primary contests.

But he has virtually no campaign team in place. No campaign manager or communications director has been chosen, and many of the arrangements for Tuesday were made by Jason Miller, a longtime adviser who now is the chief executive of Gettr, a social media company.

The former president is also now legally barred from working with Tony Fabrizio, his veteran pollster, and Taylor Budowich, a key adviser for much of the past year. Both men will work for Mr. Trump’s super PAC; under campaign finance laws, they cannot coordinate with an active candidate.

Mr. Trump’s new presidential campaign will begin as he confronts two Justice Department investigations: one into the sensitive documents held at Mar-a-Lago, and another into his actions and those taken by his allies and supporters to keep him in power after his 2020 defeat.

In addition, prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., have convened a grand jury to investigate efforts by Mr. Trump and his team to overturn the 2020 results in Georgia. A congressional committee has spent months amassing information and testimony about his conduct in the run-up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A civil investigation into his family business, the Trump Organization, led by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, resulted in a lawsuit that ensnared Mr. Trump’s children. And the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is prosecuting Mr. Trump’s company on charges of tax fraud in a trial underway in Manhattan.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy could also cut off a stream of Republican Party money that he has used to pay for his personal legal bills. The chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, has said that the committee will cease paying Mr. Trump’s legal bills once he becomes a candidate.

In recent history, no successful nonincumbent presidential candidate has opened a White House bid so long before the election. But Mr. Trump’s propensity for the unconventional has defined his political style, and it propelled his successful campaign as a first-time candidate in 2016.

Most presidential candidates are reluctant to announce campaigns this early because of strict, $2,900-per-person donation caps during the primaries. For Mr. Trump, that means he can tap his largest donors only once, until the general election race begins in 2024, to aid his candidacy directly.

Mr. Trump’s announcement also means he is now ineligible to use any of the roughly $100 million spread across three different political accounts, as of late October, to support his presidential run directly.

Still, those groups can provide indirect support, such as TV advertisem*nts or political events that advance issues that align with the former president’s agenda.

But Mr. Trump continues to amass staggering amounts of cash from small donations online, a sign of his broad grass-roots support and a key data point for his advisers who remain unconcerned about paying for an extended presidential campaign.

Another potential challenge for Mr. Trump will be whether he can articulate precisely why he wants to be president. His team identified that as a significant reason he lost re-election.

Mr. Trump laid out proposals that echoed ones he has long talked about: focusing on the economy and border security. But he also suggested a new law allowing the death penalty for drug dealers, a draconian suggestion strikingly at odds with a criminal justice overhaul bill that Mr. Trump signed as president. He has repeatedly expressed regret about the legislation, and the Republican base generally does not support it.

As president, Mr. Trump had his administration advance policies aimed at limiting immigration, confronting China and improving the economy — all issues that powered his unlikely election in 2016. He enjoyed historic drops in the unemployment rate, soaring stock-market returns, increases in median household incomes and declines in poverty during his first three years in the White House.

He spent his last year in office enmeshed in the coronavirus pandemic and in a campaign that was largely a referendum on his response to the contagion.

He repeatedly downplayed the severity of a disease that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and crippled the U.S. economy, even as his administration backed the rapid development of vaccines that paid off after he left office.

He was also impeached twice, doubling the number of presidential impeachments throughout the nation’s history.

House Democrats formally called for his removal from office after he pressed Ukraine in 2019 to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., making Mr. Trump the third president to be impeached.

He was impeached an unprecedented second time on charges that he incited the Jan. 6 attack. In both instances, Mr. Trump was acquitted in the Senate as Democrats failed to persuade enough Republicans to vote for conviction.

Only once in U.S. history has a president won a second term on a second try. That was in 1892 when Grover Cleveland, a New York Democrat who had been ousted from the White House four years earlier by Benjamin Harrison, an Indiana Republican, returned the favor in a rematch.

Among the nine other presidents ousted after one term, only one ever ran again: Martin Van Buren, who lost the Democratic nomination in 1844 and unsuccessfully ran four years later as the Free Soil Party’s nominee.

Maggie Astor and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.

Should Trump help Herschel Walker? Many Georgia Republicans are leery.

“I hope President Trump has a great time at Mar-a-Lago. And I believe that he will stay there, and I believe that he should stay there,” said Cole Muzio, president of the Georgia-based conservative political advocacy group Frontline Policy Council.

A Trump rally in Georgia could further complicate an already difficult Senate campaign season for the party. Republicans have lost control of the chamber and much of the energy they could put toward supporting Mr. Walker in his runoff against Senator Raphael Warnock has gone instead toward an internal fight among Senate Republicans in Washington — namely, between Senators Rick Scott and Mitch McConnell — over how this cycle was managed.

Also weighing on Republicans’ minds are Georgia’s changing demographics, which have put the state in play for both parties. The former president’s presence is a guaranteed animating force for Georgia’s ultraconservative voters, whom Mr. Walker will need to turn out en masse on Dec. 6. But it could also alienate swing voters and moderates in Atlanta’s suburbs who were turned off by the candidate’s scant political experience and myriad personal scandals.

For that reason, many Georgia Republicans have long tried to keep Mr. Trump at bay, lest his rhetoric hurt their prospects of recapturing a Senate seat.

“In an ideal world, he would have waited until after the runoff,” said Stephen Lawson, a Republican consultant in Georgia who leads Mr. Walker’s PAC and helped manage Kelly Loeffler’s 2020 Senate campaign.

Mr. Trump has already begun fund-raising for Mr. Walker, though his emailed solicitations to supporters on Mr. Walker’s behalf now link to his own 2024 campaign fund-raising site. But on Tuesday night in his speech announcing his presidential run, Mr. Trump implored Republicans to support Mr. Walker, calling him “a fabulous human being who loves our country.”

“He was an incredible athlete. He’ll be an even better senator,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Walker’s fame as a University of Georgia football player. “Get out and vote for Herschel Walker.”

Democrats immediately seized on Mr. Trump’s announcement, with allies of Mr. Warnock using the occasion to raise money for his runoff campaign.

“We know that he is well practiced in the politics of division,” Mr. Warnock said Tuesday of Mr. Trump. “And my opponent is his acolyte.”

Mr. Walker rarely names Mr. Trump in his campaign speeches and ads, focusing instead on condemning Mr. Warnock and President Biden. A spokesman for Mr. Walker did not respond to a request for comment.

Moreover, two of the former president’s biggest foes in the state, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, now are among its most popular figures. Both men decisively defeated challengers endorsed by Mr. Trump during the primary and went on to secure resounding victories on Election Day.

Mr. Walker’s allies have been louder in their calls for Mr. Kemp to join him on the campaign trail than they have for the former president, arguing that the governor’s strong performance on Nov. 8 would bolster Mr. Walker’s standing among the more than 200,000 voters who cast ballots to re-elect Mr. Kemp but did not vote for Mr. Walker.

Mr. Muzio, for one, said he would prefer that Mr. Walker receive help from both Mr. Kemp and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Still, some Republicans in the state see Mr. Trump as a figure who could re-energize G.O.P. voters who were demoralized by last Tuesday’s results and may be reluctant to turn back out in December.

Salleigh Grubbs, chairwoman of the Cobb County Republican Party, said she thought Mr. Trump would inspire his supporters to vote. But she also acknowledged the number of conservative voters who might be turned off by his visit.

“There are people that never liked Trump from the very beginning,” she said. “They enjoyed living in his policies, but they just didn’t like his personality. And I say, his personality is what made his policies effective.”

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Democrats blast Trump’s return, even as some hope he’d be easy to beat.

“There are some who believe it’s good he’s running, he’ll be easy to beat, others who take a much more cautious approach,” said Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, in an interview earlier Tuesday. “I believe that America spoke loudly and rejected his brand of politics, but at the same time, no one should ever underestimate him.”

President Biden on Twitter posted a video that laced into Mr. Trump’s record, assailing him over “coddling extremists” and “inciting a violent mob” as well as his record on policy matters. “Donald Trump failed America,” he wrote on Twitter.

A constellation of liberal-leaning groups released a barrage of statements vowing to defeat Mr. Trump and his movement again, two years after he lost the 2020 election to Mr. Biden in a brutally divisive campaign and then falsely claimed that the contest had been stolen.

“Donald Trump’s racist, conspiracy-theory driven, and extreme rhetoric was and still is the biggest threat to U.S. democracy,” said Jenny Lawson, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes. “In 2020, voters overwhelmingly rejected his divisive and dangerous agenda, and they will reject it again — no matter whether the agenda comes from Trump himself or one of his imitators.”

And the D.N.C. alternated between mocking Mr. Trump — “Yikes: low-energy Trump,” read one statement — and seeking to contrast his record with Mr. Biden’s. Coincidentally or not, the White House released a statement as Mr. Trump spoke, celebrating the anniversary of the bipartisan infrastructure law. Earlier in the day, Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the D.N.C., said on Twitter that “under Trump, ‘Infrastructure Week’ was just a talking point. But under @JoeBiden, it’s a reality!”

“Donald Trump was a failure as president; that’s why he lost in 2020 and it’s why he will lose again,” Mr. Harrison said in a statement, ripping into Mr. Trump’s record on a long list of issues, including the “absolute chaos that culminated in inciting a mob to attack the Capitol to try to overturn an election he knew he lost.”

“Today is just the kickoff to what will be a messy Republican primary with candidates competing to be the most extreme MAGA Republican in the race,” he continued.

Others moved to change the subject to more immediate elections, with Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, using the moment to fund-raise for Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, a Democrat who is headed into a runoff election next month.

Mr. Trump’s announcement of another bid comes on the heels of a third straight federal election in which Republicans were damaged by his political brand, which has repeatedly proved to be toxic with moderate voters. On Monday, Kari Lake — the Republican nominee for governor in Arizona, who had been regarded as a star in conservative circles — lost to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, in what was widely seen as another rebuke of Mr. Trump’s style of hard-right politics.

In recent days, the former president has confronted a striking degree of criticism from within his own party over his decisions to elevate far-right and otherwise weak candidates, a number of whom went on to lose critical races. He also ensured that his presidency never became a distant memory for swing voters.

The recriminations from Republicans — some of whom are openly calling for new party leadership and other candidates for 2024 — have played out unusually publicly, given the degree of loyalty Mr. Trump has commanded from the G.O.P. .

Whether those divisions deepen or are ultimately papered over — as has been the case in the past — remains an open question.

“Most are probably sitting back and watching the show,” said David Axelrod, the veteran Democratic strategist, asked how Democrats felt about the Trump campaign’s official re-emergence. “Trump and Trumpism had a very bad week. But it’s not clear what that means for him and the Republicans in the long run.”

Some are also closely watching Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is often seen as the leading alternative to Mr. Trump in 2024.

“It’d be fun watching them take on each other,” Mr. Biden said recently.

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Fact check: No, Trump’s tax cut was not the ‘biggest’ in history.

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Fact check: Trump’s incomplete border wall did not stop unauthorized immigration and drugs.

The number of unauthorized migrants stopped at the border could be viewed as a proxy for those who cross undetected. The numbers could also indicate more effective enforcement.

Border patrol agents apprehended roughly 400,000 unauthorized migrants in the 2020 fiscal year. During that year — the last full year under Mr. Trump — the coronavirus pandemic caused disruptions to travel and migration across the world. Officials also seized about 707,000 pounds of drugs at the southwestern border.

Many other factors beyond border security also affect migration patterns and drug smuggling: the economic and security conditions of the country of origin, the demand and supply for drugs, terrain and climate conditions, among others.

“Changes in drug smuggling cannot always be directly linked to changes in border security efforts,” the Congressional Research Service has noted.

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