Midterm Elections: Nancy Pelosi Says a ‘New Generation’ Will Lead House Democrats

Jan 29, 2024

The first woman to hold the speakership and the face of the chamber’s Democrats for two decades said she would not seek a leadership role in the next Congress. The No. 2 Democrat, Steny Hoyer, is also stepping down.

Follow the latest news on Nancy Pelosi stepping down from leadership.

Carl Hulse

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve in the post and the face of House Democrats for two decades, will not pursue a leadership post in the next Congress after Republicans take control, ending a historic tenure in which she oversaw major legislative accomplishments and led her chamber as it was threatened by rioters who stormed the Capitol.

“For me the hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect,” she said in a speech on the House floor on Thursday, setting off a rapid and long-anticipated shift in the top ranks of Democratic leadership. “And I am grateful that so many are ready and willing to shoulder this awesome responsibility.”Here’s what to know:

Shortly after Ms. Pelosi, 82, delivered her remarks, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the 83-year-old No. 2 Democrat, told his colleagues that he would not seek a leadership position in the next Congress. Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, 82 and the No. 3 Democrat, was said to be planning to cede the position of whip and seek to become the assistant leader.

Mr. Hoyer endorsed Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York to be the next Democratic leader. Mr. Jeffries, 52, is part of a younger group of Democratic leaders that has been poised to ascend, including Representatives Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, 59, and Pete Aguilar of California, 43.

President Biden said in a statement that history would remember Ms. Pelosi as “the most consequential speaker of the House of Representatives in our history.” Take a look at images of key moments of her time as speaker.

Kari Lake, the Republican who lost her bid for governor of Arizona after running a campaign heavily focused on election denialism, suggested that she planned to contest her defeat. The race of another high-profile Republican, Representative Lauren Boebert, is nearing a conclusion, or a recount.

Soumya Karlamangla

Representative Katie Porter, a prominent progressive Democrat, won in California’s 47th Congressional District, according to The Associated Press. Her district covers part of Orange County, which was considered deep red for years. The race between Porter and Scott Baugh, her Republican challenger, became one of the tightest of the midterm elections.

Catie Edmondson

In her two decades leading House Democrats, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has been one of the most powerful and iconic women in Washington. When she was sworn in as speaker in 2007, surrounded by the children of members of Congress, she became the first woman to serve in that post. And over the years, Ms. Pelosi was often photographed as the lone woman in rooms full of men, even after the ranks of Congress became more diverse.

Throughout her career, Republicans have vilified her; she is now one of the most threatened members of Congress. She had a particularly toxic relationship with former President Donald J. Trump, and their hostile interactions often drew attention, including when Ms. Pelosi aimed what appeared to be sarcastic applause at him at one of his State of the Union addresses and when she ripped up a copy of his remarks at another.

Here are the most enduring images of Ms. Pelosi during her speakership and what they mean.

Feb. 5, 2019

At the first State of the Union address that President Trump delivered to a Democratic-controlled House, Ms. Pelosi pointedly applauded as Mr. Trump called to end the “politics of revenge.” She later said that she had not intended the gesture to be “sarcastic” and in fact welcomed his message. But the moment, which went viral, concisely captured the dynamic of their relationship for the next two years.

Dec. 18, 2019

Ms. Pelosi closely oversaw the impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump, directing Democrats to move forward with an official inquiry and personally overseeing the vote that sealed him as only the third American president to be impeached.

“The president leaves us no choice but to act because he is trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his own benefit,” she said.

Jan. 4, 2007

Ms. Pelosi has repeatedly said that no issue drives her as singularly as securing the well-being of the nation’s children — so much so that her rallying cry became “for the children.” When she was first elected speaker, Ms. Pelosi invited the children and grandchildren of lawmakers to join her at the rostrum to underscore the point. She repeated the move again in 2019 when she won the speaker’s gavel a second time.

Ms. Pelosi herself raised five children before entering politics, a chapter she credits with teaching her everything she needed to know about how to herd and hound politicians. She alluded to that history on Thursday as she announced that she would step down from leadership.

When she first visited the House floor at age 6, she said, “never would I have thought that someday I would go from homemaker to House speaker.”

Feb. 4, 2020

As Mr. Trump finished his State of the Union address in 2020, Ms. Pelosi, clad in a white pantsuit that evoked the women’s suffrage movement, stood stone-faced, and ripped her copy of his speech in half, tossing the remnants on the rostrum.

The move apparently outraged Mr. Trump, but she later told Democratic lawmakers in a closed-door meeting that she felt “very liberated” by the act. If anyone had done any shredding, she told them, it was Mr. Trump, who “shred the truth right in front of us.”

Ms. Pelosi later said she kept the shreds of the speech.

Jan 3. 2019

Tensions between Ms. Pelosi and young progressive Democrats elected in 2018 like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York simmered and sometimes boiled over, as the group of liberal women of color known as “the Squad” pressed for her to take more aggressive ideological stances and the long-serving speaker questioned their effectiveness.

Dec. 11, 2018

Weeks after Democrats won control of the House in the 2018 midterms, Ms. Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, then the minority leader, sat down with Mr. Trump at the White House, in a meeting that quickly turned into a televised contest of wills.

“Mr. President,” she said at one point as Mr. Trump tried to undercut her, “please don’t characterize the strength that I bring.”

In the end, Ms. Pelosi emerged triumphant, sliding on sunglasses as she strode out of the White House in a rust-colored coat. The picture was shared so widely online that the maker of her outerwear reissued it.

Oct. 16, 2019

Clashes between Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Trump at the White House became something of a routine during the two years in which she served as speaker, and he as president. After a contentious meeting on Syria in 2019, Mr. Trump tweeted an image captured by a White House photographer showing Ms. Pelosi, at a long conference table surrounded almost entirely by men, standing and wagging her finger at him.

Aug. 3, 2022

Ms. Pelosi, who has made challenging China on human rights a signature issue in her congressional career, was criticized for a trip to Taiwan last summer, which she made despite warnings from the Biden administration not to risk provoking Beijing.

March 22 and 23, 2010

Without Ms. Pelosi, one of former President Barack Obama’s defining achievements, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, might have never become law.

With arm-twisting and tactical savvy, Ms. Pelosi was able to muster enough support in her divided caucus to pass the legislation, a feat that brought about a historic drop in the number of Americans without health insurance. About 35 million people have gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid.

Ms. Pelosi recently called passage of the law her “major accomplishment.”

January 2021

After pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Ms. Pelosi quickly worked with congressional leaders to secure the building so lawmakers could return and affirm President Biden’s victory — and then she moved to impeach Mr. Trump.

In a later interview, Ms. Pelosi joked that she would have fended off the rioters with her trademark 4-inch stiletto heels, a mainstay of her wardrobe.

“Well, I’m pretty tough,” she told USA Today. “I’m a street fighter. They would have had a battle on their hands.”

Annie Karni contributed reporting.

Chevaz Clarke

Over her two decades leading the House Democrats, Ms. Pelosi has advocated for key legislation such as the Affordable Care Act, the Covid relief bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. Here’s a look back at some of those key moments in her career.

Nicholas Fandos

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the New Yorker poised to succeed Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the leader of House Democrats, is a political liberal, a former corporate lawyer and an exceedingly careful tactician who rose to the pinnacle of power representing some of the nation’s most iconic Black neighborhoods.

If Mr. Jeffries secures his ascent in the coming weeks, he would become the first new House Democratic leader in two decades and make history: No Black politician has ever led a House or Senate caucus for either party.

His elevation would also further consolidate power in his home borough of Brooklyn, where Mr. Jeffries represents a plurality Black district and lives less than a mile from the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer.

Mr. Jeffries, 52, currently House Democrats’ fifth-ranking leader, helped craft the messaging plan, heavy on pocketbook issues like health care and taxes, that Democrats used to reclaim the majority in 2018. He was a vehement critic of former President Donald J. Trump, whom he once called the “grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” in a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. He was also appointed, by Ms. Pelosi, as one of the House prosecutors during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial. (He quoted from Biggie Smalls, a fellow Brooklynite, during the trial.)

In many ways, he and Ms. Pelosi have little in common.

The daughter of a congressman and former mayor, she commands vast personal wealth and came to embody the progressive social politics of her adopted hometown, San Francisco, in stilettos. She is a master legislator who has helped pass landmark legislation for two decades.

He is the son of a middle-class social worker and case worker for New York City who still lives in the heart of Black Brooklyn and often pairs his suits with sneakers. Outside of bipartisan federal sentencing reform, his own legislative record is relatively thin.

But they do share key qualities. Both enjoy the widespread confidence of colleagues, have shown a willingness to check the most aggressive left-leaning factions of their party, and have earned reputations as disciplined messengers.

Without ever declaring his desire for the top job, Mr. Jeffries appears to have more or less cleared the field of potential competition in recent months. On Thursday, he declined to publicly discuss his future, repeatedly directing attention back to Ms. Pelosi, whom he called “a leader for the ages.”

“We’ll see what happens as we move forward,” he told reporters in the Capitol. “But now is the moment to celebrate.”

Before winning a seat in Congress in 2012, Mr. Jeffries served for six years in the New York State Assembly. He has also been a corporate lawyer for CBS and Paul, Weiss, and once considered running for mayor of New York City.

Mr. Jeffries is married to a social worker and has two sons.

Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.

Erin Schaff

Speaker Nancy Pelosi was applauded by her entire staff as she walked off the House floor after announcing that she would step down from Democratic leadership in January. Staff members clapped and cheered, while several cried.

Luke Broadwater

Minutes after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would no longer seek to lead House Democrats, a new and younger trio of leaders began a campaign to take over their caucus’s top ranks.

Representatives Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California were expected to seek the top three spots among House Democrats, according to people familiar with the plans, while Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina was expected to cede his job as whip and seek to become the assistant leader.

It would be a dramatic generational shift from a leadership team of Ms. Pelosi, Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland and Mr. Clyburn — all in their 80s — to three lawmakers in their 40s and 50s. (Mr. Jeffries is 52; Ms. Clark is 59; and Mr. Aguilar is 43.)

Mr. Hoyer said he, too, would step out of leadership and support Mr. Jeffries. Mr. Clyburn, one of the more senior Democrats on the Hill, said on Twitter that he looked forward to “doing whatever I can to assist our new generation of Democratic Leaders, which I hope to be Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark, and Pete Aguilar.”

Mr. Jeffries, who if he prevailed would be the first Black man to lead a party in Congress, in a statement emphasized the need for more diversity in leadership.

“The speaker often reminds us that our diversity is our strength,” Mr. Jeffries said. “I know we will draw on that wisdom often as we come together as a caucus to begin a new chapter, reflecting the hopes, dreams and aspirations of the people we represent.”

It was not immediately clear whether other challengers for the positions would emerge, but Ms. Pelosi said in her speech she believed it was time for new leaders.

“The hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect,” Ms. Pelosi said.

The leadership election is scheduled for Nov. 30.

Annie Karni

In an interview, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Pelosi’s announcement was a historic moment that would bring change to the Democratic caucus. But she did not throw her support behind Hakeem Jeffries, who in the past has butted heads with progressive groups like Justice Democrats. Asked about him possibly rising to be the Democratic leader, she said: “I’m just processing what just happened. There is a lot of healing that needs to be done in our caucus.”

The New York Times

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on the House floor on Thursday that she would not seek a leadership role in the next Congress. The following is a transcript of her remarks, as recorded by The New York Times.

NANCY PELOSI: Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, as we gather here, we stand on sacred ground: the chamber of the United States House of Representatives, the heart of American democracy. I will never forget the first time I saw the Capitol. It was on a cold January day when I was 6 years old. My father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was about to be sworn in for his fifth term in Congress representing our beloved hometown of Baltimore.

I was riding in the car with my brothers, and they were thrilled and jumping up and down and saying to me, “Nancy, look, there’s the Capitol.” And I keep — every time I’d say: “I don’t see any capital. Is it a capital A, a capital B or a capital C?”

And finally, I saw it. A stunning white building with a magnificent dome.

I believed then, as I believe today, this is the most beautiful building in the world because of what it represents. The Capitol is a temple of our democracy, of our Constitution, of our highest ideals.

On that day — on that day, I stood with my father on this floor as he took the sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. All of us who have served in this House have taken the hallowed oath of office. And it is the oath that stitches us together in a long and storied heritage. Colleagues who served before us are all our colleagues. Colleagues like Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Webster, Shirley Chisholm, Patsy Mink and our beloved John Lewis.

Personally, it binds me as a colleague to my father, a proud New Deal congressman and one of the earliest Italian Americans to serve in the Congress. And this is an oath we are duty bound to keep, and it links us with the highest aspirations of the ages.

In this room, our colleagues across history have abolished slavery; granted women the right to vote; established Social Security and Medicare; offered a hand to the weak, care to the sick, education to the young and hope to the many.

Indeed, it is here, under the gaze of our patriarch, George Washington, in the people’s House, that we have done the people’s work.

My colleagues, I stand before you as speaker of the House, as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a devout Catholic, a proud Democrat and a patriotic American, a citizen of the greatest republic in the history of the world — which President Lincoln called the last best hope on Earth. Indeed, in the words attributed to another of our colleagues, the legendary Daniel Webster, he said: “Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution of your country and the government established under it. Miracles do not cluster. That which has happened but once in 6,000 years cannot be expected to happen often.”

Indeed, American democracy is majestic. But it is fragile. Many of us here have witnessed its fragility firsthand — tragically, in this chamber. And so democracy must be forever defended from forces that wish it harm.

Last week, the American people spoke, and their voices were raised in defense of liberty, of the rule of law and of democracy itself.

With these elections, the people stood in the breach and repelled the assault on democracy. They resoundingly rejected violence and insurrection, and in doing so gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

And now we owe to the American people our very best, to deliver on their faith. To forever reach for the more perfect union — the glorious horizon that our founders promised.

The questions before this Congress and at this moment are urgent. Questions about the ideals that this House is charged by the Constitution to preserve and protect. Establish justice. Ensure domestic tranquillity. Provide for the common defense. Promote the general welfare. And secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Our posterity. Our children. Babies born today will live into the next century. And our decisions will determine their future for generations to come.

While we will have our disagreements on policy, we must remain fully committed to our shared fundamental mission, to hold strong to our most treasured democratic ideals, to cherish the spark of divinity in each and every one of us, and to always put our country first.

In their infinite wisdom, our founders gave us their guidance: e pluribus unum. From the many, one. They could not have imagined how large our country would become or how different we would be from one another. But they knew we had to be united as one. We the people. One country. One destiny.

It’s been with great pride in my 35 years in the House I have seen this body grow more reflective of our great nation, our beautiful nation.

When I came to the Congress in 1987, there were 12 Democratic women. Now there are over 90. And we want more.

The new members of our Democratic caucus will be about 75 percent women, people of color and L.G.B.T.Q. And we have brought more voices to the decision-making table. When I entered leadership in 2002, there were eight of us. Today, there are 17 members of the leadership. When I first came to the floor at 6 years old, never would I have thought that someday I would go from homemaker to House speaker.

In fact, I never — in fact, I never intended to run for public office. Mommy and Daddy taught us through their example that public service is a noble calling and that we all have a responsibility to help others. In our family, my brother Tommy then became mayor of Baltimore also. But it’s been my privilege to play a part in forging extraordinary progress for the American people.

I have enjoyed working with three presidents, achieving historic investments in clean energy with President George Bush; transformative health care reform with President Barack Obama; and forging — and forging the future from infrastructure to health care to climate action with President Joe Biden.

Now we must move boldly into the future, grounded by the principles that have propelled us this far and open to fresh possibilities for the future.

Scripture teaches us that for everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven. My friends, no matter what title you all, my colleagues, have bestowed upon me — speaker, leader, whip — there is no greater official honor for me than to stand on this floor and to speak for the people of San Francisco. This I will continue to do as a member of the House, speaking for the people of San Francisco, serving the great state of California and defending our Constitution.

And with great confidence in our caucus, I will not seek re-election to Democratic leadership in the next Congress. For me, the hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect. And I am grateful that so many are ready and willing to shoulder this awesome responsibility.

Madam Speaker, standing here today, I’m endlessly grateful for all of life’s blessings, for my Democratic colleagues, whose courage and commitment, with the support of your families, have made many of these accomplishments possible. In fact, could not have been done without you.

For my dear husband, Paul, who has been my beloved partner in life and my pillar of support, thank you. We’re all grateful for all the prayers and well wishes as he continues his recovery. Thank you so much.

For our darling children, Nancy Corinne, Christine, Jacqueline, Paul and Alexandra, and our grandchildren, Alexander and Madeleine; Liam, Sean and Ryan; Paul and Thomas; Bella and Octavio. They are the joys of our lives for whom we — and we are so very, very proud of them and a comfort to us at this time.

And for my brilliant, dedicated and patriotic staff, under the leadership of Terri McCullough, together, working together, the finest group of public servants the House has ever known. Thank you all so much.

And again, for those who sent me here, for the people of San Francisco, for entrusting me with the high honor of being their voice in Congress. In this continued work, I will strive to honor the call of the patron saint of our city, St. Francis. Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.

In this House, we begin each day with a prayer and a pledge to the flag. And every day I am in awe of the majestic miracle that is American democracy. As we participate in a hallmark of our republic — the peaceful, orderly transition from one Congress to the next — let us consider the words of, again, President Lincoln, spoken during one of America’s darkest hours. He called upon us to come together, to swell the chorus of the union, when once again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature. That again is the task at hand.

A new day is dawning on the horizon, and I look forward, always forward, to the unfolding story of our nation, a story of light and love, of patriotism and progress, of many becoming one. And always an unfinished mission to make the dreams of today the reality of tomorrow.

Thank you all. May God bless you and your families. And may God bless — continue to bless our veterans and the United States of America. Thank you all so much.

Catie Edmondson

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, on the Senate floor, recalls sheltering in a secure location with Pelosi on Jan. 6, 2021, as the Capitol was under siege and marveling at how “calm and collected” she was as they worked to reopen the building to certify President Biden’s election. It was “one of her greatest moments,” Schumer said.

Alexandra Berzon and Jim Rutenberg

Kari Lake, the Republican who lost her bid for governor of Arizona after running a campaign heavily focused on election denialism, suggested in a video on Thursday that she planned to contest her defeat, arguing without evidence that voters had been disenfranchised.

In a video posted on Twitter, Ms. Lake said she had assembled lawyers and was “exploring every avenue,” adding, “my resolve to fight for you is higher than ever.”

She pointed to problems with ballot tabulation machines that led to long lines of voters in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is the state’s largest county. But there has been no evidence that significant numbers of people were unable to cast their ballots, let alone the 17,200 voters who make up Ms. Lake’s losing margin to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.

Ms. Lake insinuated that Ms. Hobbs, the state’s top election official, was responsible for the problems. But Ms. Hobbs did not directly run Maricopa County’s election.

Ms. Lake had made conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential contest and Arizona’s election system a centerpiece of her campaign. While some Republicans in Arizona, including former Gov. Jan Brewer, said she should concede or called Ms. Hobbs to congratulate her, many expected Ms. Lake to try to fight the outcome.

On Thursday, Ms. Lake, who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, was visiting Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida, according to a person familiar with her appearance. This week, after Mr. Trump announced that he was running again for president in 2024, she wrote on his social media site Truth Social that “he has my complete and total endorsement!”

Election officials in Maricopa County say that even though some problems with tabulators arose on Election Day, all voters were given the opportunity to vote.

Ms. Lake and her allies have collected statements from voters, poll workers and poll watchers, and promoted their complaints on social media, with some voters saying in videos that they had seen people leave long lines out of apparent frustration. But nearly all of the voters specified that they were ultimately able to cast their ballots, according to a review of dozens of these accounts by The New York Times.

Even in the example Ms. Lake cited in her video — a man who faced an hourslong wait and frustrating problems as he hopped among voting centers — she noted that he did manage to cast his ballot.

Problems with printers at voting centers — which affected nearly 30 percent of Maricopa’s 223 polling sites, according to the county — caused tabulation machines to reject thousands of ballots, which created long lines as voters and workers struggled with the machines. Officials say less than 7 percent of all ballots were affected. But Maricopa’s system was designed with fail-safes.

Voters could cast their ballots in a secure box, which would then be sent to Maricopa’s central tabulation center under bipartisan observation, with the votes to be counted later. They could also go to other voting centers, since Maricopa allows residents to vote at any of its locations.

Many voters, heeding some state Republican leaders who had issued baseless warnings not to trust the secure ballot boxes, either waited to successfully scan their ballots in the tabulators or left for other voting locations. In a separate video Ms. Lake posted on Twitter on Thursday morning, a man said that he was given the option to put his vote in the secure box but that he did not want to. He said he instead voted through a system designed for handicapped voters, which worked.

In an initial, failed lawsuit to extend voting hours because of the glitches, Republican Party lawyers maintained that in several cases, because of poor instructions or mistakes by poll workers, those who tried to vote elsewhere found they could not. But a judge rejected those claims, saying he had seen no evidence that voters had been disenfranchised.

It is unclear what next steps Ms. Lake or other Republican candidates in Arizona might take.

In interviews, election lawyers said that Maricopa’s problems on Election Day did place an unexpected burden on voters of the sort that could conceivably form the basis of a lawsuit. But they added that based on what is known now, any legal action would not come close to blocking the certification of Ms. Hobbs’s victory.

Sarah Brannon, a managing attorney for the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that if a legal case were successfully brought — so far, she said, her group had not seen “credible evidence” for one — any court-ordered remedies would be focused on ensuring that similar problems did not occur a second time. She said it was “extremely rare” that judges order new elections, which would require overwhelming amounts of evidence. Generally, such a step would be taken only in cases of malfeasance or fraud, not simply long lines.

Ms. Brannon said that Maricopa officials had shown good faith in mitigating the problems, swiftly dispatching technology experts and keeping the public informed of other ways to vote.

An aide to Ms. Hobbs, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a legal threat from Ms. Lake that has yet to materialize, said that under Arizona law, the Republicans would have to show that the problems affected the outcome of the race in order to successfully challenge the election results.

Maggie Haberman and Ken Bensinger contributed reporting.

Emily Cochrane

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, said on Thursday that he would not seek an elected leadership position in the next Congress, endorsing Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York to lead the caucus following Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to step aside.

“Now is the time for a new generation of leaders, and I am proud to offer my strong endorsement to Hakeem Jeffries for Democratic leader, a role in which he will make history for the institution of the House and for our country,” Mr. Hoyer, 83, wrote in a letter to his colleagues.

“I look forward to serving as a resource to him, to the rest of our Democratic leadership team, and to our entire caucus in whatever capacity I can best be of assistance as we move forward together to address the nation’s challenges,” he added.

Mr. Hoyer’s announcement came shortly after Ms. Pelosi revealed her decision in an emotional speech on the House floor. He has long served in Ms. Pelosi’s shadow, having been defeated by her for the job of Democratic whip in 2001, and the two have nurtured a quiet rivalry. While he has never challenged her directly again, when Democrats first nominated Ms. Pelosi to be speaker in 2006, Mr. Hoyer ran against her handpicked candidate for the second-ranking post of majority leader, and won. He has ranked one spot below her in the party’s leadership ever since.

Asked how it felt to step out of leadership by reporters afterward, he acknowledged, “not good.”

When Ms. Pelosi said in 2018 that she would only serve another two terms as the top leader of her party — part of a compromise to win the votes of Democrats who wanted to see a new generation at the helm — Mr. Hoyer pointedly said he was not part of any such deal, prompting speculation that he might try to ascend when Ms. Pelosi made her exit.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Mr. Hoyer added that he was confident he could have secured the votes to remain the No. 2 Democrat, saying there was “no doubt about it.”

But Mr. Hoyer’s swift announcement on Thursday reflected an acknowledgment that Democrats, preparing for two years in the minority, were ready for younger leaders at the top.

Mr. Hoyer said he planned to focus on legislative work, including returning to the Appropriations Committee, which oversees government funding. He said he would not seek a leadership role on the committee.

“I care a lot about my country, I care a lot about the House of Representatives,” he said. “And so I’m going to play what positive role I can play.”

Maggie Astor

The closest House race in the nation appears to be headed toward a recount.

Nine days after the election, the contest in Colorado’s Third Congressional District, between Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican, and her Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, remains undecided. As of Thursday evening, according to The Associated Press, Ms. Boebert leads by a mere 0.16 percentage points — or, 551 votes of nearly 327,000 counted to date.

Nearly all of the votes have been counted, according to The A.P., which declared the race too close to call. The margin qualifies for an automatic recount under state law, which would further delay a call — possibly for weeks.

A full accounting is anticipated by Friday, which is the deadline for counties to submit their tabulations to the Colorado secretary of state.

Under state law, a recount is mandatory if the margin is half a percentage point or less of the top vote-getter’s total. That recount must be ordered by Dec. 5 and would need to be completed by Dec. 13, according to the secretary of state’s office.

Ms. Boebert, a far-right firebrand, heckled President Biden during his State of the Union speech, and is among a group of Republicans vocally loyal to former President Donald J. Trump. She also ignored mask rules and security checks while entering the Capitol last year. And she has boasted of carrying her gun to Washington.

The total ballot count in the race remained stagnant for much of the past week because of two factors.

One, mail ballots from members of the military and Americans living overseas were allowed to arrive as late as Wednesday. And also, voters whose ballots were rejected for reasons like mismatched signatures had until Wednesday to correct those problems, a process known as curing. Democrats and Republicans alike have been pleading with voters to complete that process.

Emily Cochrane

Instead, Hoyer issued an endorsement of Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York for Democratic leader. “I look forward to serving as a resource to him, to the rest of our Democratic leadership team, and to our entire caucus in whatever capacity I can best be of assistance as we move forward together to address the nation’s challenges.”

Emily Cochrane

In a letter to his colleagues, Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat, says he also will not seek a leadership position.

Emily Cochrane

Off to the side as Pelosi continues embracing lawmakers, you can see Representatives Hakeem Jeffries of New York, widely viewed as the next Democratic leader, and Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the likely candidate for the No. 2 position, quietly conferring with colleagues. Without knowing next steps for Pelosi, the race for leadership votes has been in limbo.

Catie Edmondson

Minutes after Ms. Pelosi concluded her speech, Derrick Van Orden, an incoming Republican congressman from Wisconsin who helped his party flip the House, tweeted a photo of himself on the campaign trail holding a sign that said “FIRE PELOSI.” “Promises Made. Promises Kept,” Mr. Van Orden wrote.

Michael D. Shear

President Biden spoke with Speaker Pelosi this morning and congratulated her on her historic tenure as speaker of the House.

Emily Cochrane

So many of these Democrats who have tangled with Speaker Nancy Pelosi — lawmakers who helped stall passage of the landmark climate, tax and health care bill in 2021 — were among those taking photos and wiping away tears as she spoke. She still maintains respect for her ability to bring the caucus together and maneuver high-profile priorities into law.

Carl Hulse

Pelosi is surrounded by colleagues giving her extended embraces and well wishes before the speaker’s rostrum.

Emily Cochrane

Pelosi is now embracing Representative Eric Swalwell’s daughter — a moment reminiscent of when she called all the children present in the chamber to the dais when she was sworn in as speaker.

Emily Cochrane

Speaker Pelosi, having concluded her speech, now embraces members of the California delegation. She is being swarmed by members kissing her on the cheek and giving her hugs.

Catie Edmondson

“A new day is dawning on the horizon,” Pelosi says, underscoring the monumental void she is leaving in Democratic leadership

Catie Edmondson

“For me the hour's come for a new generation to lead the democratic caucus that I so deeply respect. And I am grateful that so many are ready and willing to shoulder this awesome responsibility,” Pelosi said.

Emily Cochrane

Pelosi’s staff members are seated in the gallery and — unaccustomed to such public recognition — are now on their feet for applause from lawmakers.

Emily Cochrane

The entire chamber is on its feet, including Republicans, to applaud the speaker. They are now applauding her family, seated in the gallery for the occasion.

Emily Cochrane

A couple Democrats are wiping away tears, particularly as she makes mention of her husband, Paul, who is recovering from a vicious attack at their home.

Annie Karni

Pelosi says she will remain in the House as a rank-and-file member, representing her constituents. But she will not seek a leadership position.

Emily Cochrane

Camera flashes go off in a back row of the chamber as Pelosi’s remarks turn to the future.

Carl Hulse

“Homemaker to House speaker,” Pelosi says in charting her political path.

Emily Cochrane

No sign yet, however, of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who has been chosen by the majority Republicans to be the next speaker in January. He has a notoriously poor relationship with Pelosi.

Emily Cochrane

Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and slated to be majority leader in the House in January, has just entered.

Annie Karni

It’s always remarkable to remember that this has all been a second life for Pelosi. She was a stay-at-home mom of five kids, a chapter she credits with teaching her everything she needed to know about how to herd and hound politicians.

Maggie Astor

Pelosi says voters last week “stood in the breach and repelled the assault on democracy” by rejecting election deniers.

Carl Hulse

Pelosi mentions her role as a mother and frequently laughingly notes at events that she had five children in six years. She attributes her high energy level to having to deal with them.

Emily Cochrane

Pelosi makes reference to the Jan. 6, 2021, as she talks about the fragility of the nation’s democracy, acknowledging the colleagues who fled the House chamber that day.

Catie Edmondson

Pelosi here is tracing many of the same themes that President Biden hammered home on the campaign trail, both in 2020 and in the midterms: that democracy is “fragile” and must be defended.

Emily Cochrane

Representative Eric Swalwell of California appears to have brought his daughter with him to witness the occasion.

Catie Edmondson

Pelosi is wearing a brooch representing the mace of the United States House of Representatives, the battle staff that has embodied the legislative branch’s authority since 1789. She has worn it on many important occasions, including President Donald Trump’s first impeachment.

Carl Hulse

A Pelosi shoutout to the late Representative John Lewis, the civil rights figure and an icon to House Democrats.

Annie Karni

Pelosi begins with a love letter to the Capitol, a building she first laid eyes on when she was 6 years old and visiting Washington with her father, who was a congressman.

Emily Cochrane

Pelosi, with a black binder at hand, has begun to speak.

Emily Cochrane

Pelosi appears to be poised off to the side, flanked by some of her most senior staff members, as she waits for her turn.

Emily Cochrane

While we all wait for Ms. Pelosi to speak, this is routine business for the House: giving lawmakers the opportunity to begin the daily session with one-minute speeches on whatever topic they choose. There is generally not such a large audience — usually these kinds of speeches are delivered to an empty room.

Emily Cochrane

Here is the full prayer from the chaplain, which I suspect could be quite meaningful for Pelosi, a Catholic: “We pray for the health and welfare of this illustrious body, that as the scenery changes and the actors move on, around, or off the stage you will uphold each one. Guide them in the roles you have called them to fulfill, and grant them wisdom to discern the way you would have them go.”

Emily Cochrane

As you look across the chamber, you can see dozens of longtime Pelosi allies and friends: It appears Representative Anna Eshoo, of California, who have been longtime friends for decades, will preside over the chamber when she speaks, while the California delegation is seated up front. Pelosi's staff is lining the back of the room, along with other leadership staff.

‘The Run-Up’ Team

The U.S. midterms have left both parties in a moment of reflection. For Republicans, it’s time to make a choice about Trumpism. Democrats, on the other hand, must decide where to concentrate their future efforts.

Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for The New York Times, explores what the results of the midterms mean for both parties in the years to come.

transcript

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

I think the state of democracy right now is very shaky.

From the beginning, these midterms were about democracy.

I’m worried that democracy is being eroded.

Our Democratic system is under direct threat.

I think democracy’s — I think it’s much more fragile than I realized.

Well, as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault.

When President Biden made that his central message to voters —

I’m asking our nation to come together, unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy, regardless of your ideology.

— the question was not whether Americans believed democracy was on the ballot. It was how strong their commitment to democracy really was.

And that’s where I want to address something that’s bugging me for a long time.

Would voters care?

We are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. Nowhere in the Constitution does it use the word democracy.

Would they reject a growing anti-democratic sentiment taking hold at the state level?

For as our president says, we worship God, not government. God bless you.

A hardened strain of Christianity gaining grounds across the Republican base.

We do not consent to you kneecapping our governor before he even takes office! We do not consent to you silencing our votes! And we do not —

All of it enabled by elected officials, who have been working to seize control of the structures of power. And when I asked Democratic lawmakers how they planned to combat all this —

And everybody who’s listening to this podcast, who cares about these issues, needs to fight harder. I mean, make phone calls. Go door to door. Send resources.

They said people would have to vote harder and keep the faith.

America is not great because it is more enlightened than any other nation, but rather because it has always been able to repair its faults.

But it wasn’t clear from polling whether that message was really gaining any traction. And so as members of his own party braced for defeat —

In our bones, we know democracy is at risk. But we also know this. It’s within our power, each and every one of us, to preserve our democracy.

President Biden made one final plea.

You have the power. It’s your choice. It’s your decision. The fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America, lies where it always does, with the people.

It turns out, it kind of worked.

In your hands, in your heart, in your ballot.

From The New York Times, I’m Astead Herndon. This is “The Run-Up.”

[THEME MUSIC]

Shane, have you recovered from last week?

I mean, it’s like one week ago for the formal end of the 2022 campaign. We haven’t even called the House at this exact moment, and yet we’re about to have a 2024 campaign. So I would say, no, I have not. I have not yet recovered.

You know, I remember —

Earlier this week, as the results from the midterms were still being processed, I called my colleague, Shane Goldmacher.

Shane, I’m really excited to have you on and to be able to do this. For maybe the unaware, you’re a national political correspondent, which means that pretty much your job is to understand the parties and where they’re at, what they’re up to, what their message is particularly at a high level.

In that context, I want to think about the midterms that we all just experienced. How was the Democratic Party thinking about Joe Biden’s message heading into the midterms? And how was the party specifically thinking about his ask of voters to protect democracy over everything else?

I mean, I would say the weekend before the midterms, the party was largely freaking out. They were freaking out about what they expected to be significant losses in the House of Representatives. They were freaking out about the possibility of also losing the Senate. And when it came to the president, they were worried that he wasn’t talking about the issue that in poll after poll was shown to be the top issue for voters in 2022, which was the economy and inflation.

And there was actually a moment just before the midterms that I think really captured this, which was Hilary Rosen, who is this longtime Democratic strategist, been around forever, and she did the Sunday shows. And she was on CNN. And she sort of ripped into the Democrats and said, we have missed the message on this election.

The voters keep telling us over and over, we care most about the economy. And all we are doing is talking about how democracy is at stake. This is the catch phrase in politics. It’s like, meet people where they’re at, right? So we were not meeting people where we’re at. That was the concern that Democrats had over and over and over again heading into the election.

I mean, one of the nights that I was working, one of the many nights that I was working late this last few weeks, and I was in the office, I stayed to cover Joe Biden’s speech about democracy. And I was in the office late enough that I said, I’m taking a taxi home. And I remember calling.

And I talked to several Democrats on my taxi ride home. And I was saying, hey, what did you think of the president’s speech? And they said, look, I mean, it’s fine. They weren’t against him giving a speech about democracy the week before the election, but it wasn’t what their campaigns were about. They felt that it was him talking about an important moral cause, but not necessarily something that was helpful politically.

Right. There was a feeling that Biden and other Democrats were overly focused on trying to convince voters to reject growing extremism and that maybe that wasn’t something that the majority of Americans were all that troubled by.

Yeah. I mean, there was a ton of criticism for Democrats for intervening a handful of these primaries to push these more extreme Republican candidates who were successful in a House race in Michigan, where the Democrats backed a more extreme Republican who ousted in a primary, one of the 10 Republicans who had voted to impeach Donald Trump. There was pushback to that.

There was pushback to Democrats pushing through candidates, for instance, in Illinois for governor and how the Democrats got a lot of — can you say shit? While the Democrats got a lot of problems for doing that, you can lose the fact that there’s a supply and demand issue here, which is the Republican electorate, there was demand for these kinds of candidates. So the Democrats —

Yeah!

— helped supply the candidates, but the voters were looking for them. And so when Joe Biden was talking about this, he was talking about a real phenomenon that the Republican Party was moving in this direction, that if you took the totality of the 2022 primaries, Donald Trump, for the most part, was winning in terms of getting candidates aligned with him through the Republican primaries. And so when you look at how the results came out, his focus on democracy was part of a broader message that he was pushing. It was part —

Right.

— of a broader message that Democrats were pushing, which was this is a Republican Party that is so extreme that they will take away your democracy. They will take away your abortion rights. They’ll take away your Social Security. They’ll take away your X, Y and Z. And put it all together, and it seems like it had some success.

Mm. Two things there. One, to highlight what you said, I think that is a core point. What we often talk about as bad candidates was really a reflection of what Republican voters wanted. The slate that Republicans had in this midterm, as we talked about on this show, was often driven by Republican voters who have wanted those grievances reflected in their candidates.

But then the second thing here is, I mean, it wasn’t fully out of left field for people to question that democracy messaging strategy, right? To your point, polling did consistently show that Americans ranked economy as the top concern, concerns about inflation as a broader concern. How should we think about that type of issue-based polling that told us that consistently throughout the year and what we know to be true now, which is that voters were really concerned about democracy and protecting the political system?

Yeah. I mean, I think the real question is about how do you ask people, what are the issues you care most about? Because in poll after poll, including The New York Times poll that we did in October, overwhelmingly, inflation and the economy were the top issues. It was 44 percent of voters said those were the top issues for them. And democracy, that was down at the 8 percent, 9 percent range.

And so if you’re going to say, well, what’s the most important issue, I think the most important issue of the 2022 elections was probably the economy and inflation, but it doesn’t mean that it was the decisive issue. And I think that that’s where you get into what the Democratic messaging was, which was it was trying to take this election and, for voters, say, look, you might not like the economy, you might not like Joe Biden, but if you go to the voting booth, don’t just think about the economy.

Don’t just think about Joe Biden. Think about the broader consequences for this country. Don’t make it a referendum on Joe Biden. Don’t say, I don’t like Joe Biden, so we’re going to vote for the Republican. Say, I don’t like Joe Biden, but I also really do value abortion rights. But I also really do value free and fair elections. But I also really do value X, Y and Z priorities that the Democratic Party aligned with them on.

And what you can see is, in totality, in many states — we can get into this, but in many states — the results show that on balance, voters were choosing the suite of issues that were not just their feelings about Joe Biden and not just their feelings about the economy when they cast their ballots.

Mm-hmm. I know it’s just a week from election results. I know that we’re going to get more and more info about the specifics of who came out on Tuesday. But to the extent that we know now, who responded specifically to that message about protecting democracy?

I think I’d answer that question a little bit differently by not exactly answering your question. But what I would say is that Joe Biden won in 2020 chiefly by motivating an anti-Trump, stop-Trump coalition. And the same coalition was what delivered Democrats the House of Representatives in 2018.

And so for the Democrats, for the White House, this was the kind of messaging that could pull the party together and bring in progressives who might have been disaffected with some of the things that Joe Biden didn’t push through, moderates who might have had misgivings about Joe Biden’s leadership, that those are both voters who went with Joe Biden in 2020, and that this kind of messaging could bring them around in 2022.

And while the exit polls will continue to get adjusted in the days and weeks ahead, there’s one really interesting finding in the exit polls that shows where this worked, which is voters rank their feelings about the president in four main categories. Do you approve strongly?

Yep.

Do you somewhat approve? Do you somewhat disapprove? Or do you strongly disapprove? What happened this election that’s really different is that voters who somewhat disapproved of Joe Biden actually voted for the Democrats.

So a plurality, 49 percent, of voters who said they somewhat disapproved of Joe Biden, they nonetheless went and voted for a Democrat for Congress. And that’s very different than what has happened before. In the 2018 midterms, during Trump’s first term, during the 2010 midterms, during Barack Obama’s first term, those voters went overwhelmingly for the opposition party. So for months going into the election, Republicans said, oh, look at Joe Biden’s approval rating. We’re going to win. The environment is so bad. He’s at 41 percent. He’s at 40 percent. This is toxic. You can’t run that far ahead of Joe Biden’s political gravity. And at the end of the day, that’s what Democrats did because a chunk of voters, who didn’t like Joe Biden, nonetheless went and voted for a Democrat.

It somewhat feels like 2020, where you have this unlikely and, frankly, relatively dissatisfied coalition turn up and vote for the Democrat anyway, even though it wasn’t always clear that they would.

I mean, this is the dynamic typically in a midterm, right? The party out of power — and at this point, the Republicans were out of the House, they were out of the Senate, and they were out of the White House — they’re usually the party that’s most pissed off. They’re the party that’s aggrieved. They’re the party that’s getting policy stuffed down their throat that they hate.

And if you look back at 2018, and you think about how Democrats were feeling during those midterms, they were the ones having everything ripped away from them by Donald Trump. And you go back to 2010 and think about those midterms. It was the Republicans who were exclusively having everything ripped away from them by Democrats. They were angry about the spending. They were angry about the health care bill.

But this year, it was different. The single most impactful change that happened, it was being stuffed down the throats of Democrats, right? The Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court, it’s just hard to overlook. This took away a half-century of federal abortion rights.

And so what you had is a Democratic base — not just a Republican base, but a Democratic base — that was having their policy priorities ripped away from them. So the dynamics were different. And I think that the messaging around the Republican Party sort of tried to tie all those things together. And I think it surprised most people. It surprised even Democrats the degree to which it was successful.

The Republicans are still taking control of the House. And in the House, 218 votes is the only thing that matters. They’ll have subpoena power. They’ll have power to initiate investigations. But when it comes to setting the stakes of how the election unfolded, I do think it’s hard to overlook that inversion, that the party out of power is usually the ones that are getting screwed. And in this case, the people who are in power in Washington, their voters are the ones feeling most aggrieved.

We’ll be right back.

So Shane, Democrats were able to successfully make the case for democracy protection, especially in important battleground races. But let’s square that, though, with results we saw in other parts of the country. I’m thinking of New York or Florida, where there was a significant shift in the Republican direction. This is something our colleague, Nate Cohn, has been reporting on.

The 2022 midterms unfolded in a way that recent midterms and recent elections haven’t, frankly, which is to say they didn’t unfold uniformly, the same way, all across the country. There wasn’t so much a national trend at the House of Representatives. There was a series of state trends.

In New York, the Republicans are going to pick up several seats, even though this is one of the most Democratic states in the country. But in many of the battlegrounds, the places where Trump-aligned candidates were talking about not certifying the last election, states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, there wasn’t a red wave. There was a blue wave, that voters came out because they were motivated by the suite of issues we talked about already.

They were motivated to protect democracy. They were motivated because abortion was quite literally on the ballot in Michigan this year, where there was an abortion measure. And in Michigan, the Democrats are actually taking more power, taking over parts of the legislature.

In Pennsylvania, there was a strong rejection of the Republican candidate for Governor Doug Mastriano by, really, a landslide in a state that’s that close. And along the way, John Fetterman won the Senate race. The only Senate seat to flip so far is for the Democrats, and it came in a battleground state.

And so in these states, where the issues of democracy and abortion were more viscerally there, they won statewide, and they won locally. And so that was a very different election than the one you saw in New York. It was a very different election than you’ve seen in California, where they continue to count the votes.

It wasn’t that there wasn’t some red waves. It was that the red wave was true in New York, but it wasn’t true next door in Pennsylvania. And, again, that’s different. We have not seen an election like that, that was localized by state, in many years.

I guess you’re saying that to the extent that media and the Democratic Party missed the story, it was in seeing things going the way that you would expect, or even worse, in places like New York or Florida and thinking, oh, this is going to be what happens nationally, that voters are not going to respond to that kind of “democracy on the ballot” question. It won’t be enough.

When as it turned out, particularly in the most critical races, in the biggest battlegrounds, and when democracy and extremism felt really tangible to voters, when it didn’t feel, really, like a theory or academic concept, people did behave very differently.

I mean, if you look at the win-loss record of the Republicans that Trump backed, who were election deniers in these key swing states, it’s overwhelmingly a series of losses. It’s Kari Lake in Arizona losing. It’s Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania losing. It’s Tim Michels in Wisconsin losing. It’s Tudor Dixon in Michigan losing.

The lone win is in Nevada, where the Republican is winning the governorship and unseating the Democratic governor. That’s just the governors’ races. And if you go into Secretary of States’ races, all of the Republican candidates who ran on Trump’s denial of the last election, they all lost. And you just don’t often get that kind of uniform defeat in a midterm for the party out of power.

Mm-hmm. It’s interesting because in the lead up to the election, abortion and democracy were sort of being talked about as two distinct and separate issues — abortion as a tangible issue that might mobilize voters and help Democrats turn out specifically among the base, and democracy as this kind of existential threat that it wasn’t clear if Americans would respond to.

But in the end, it seems like you’re describing a midterms environment where they sort of work together as part of a larger message about unchecked extremism among Republicans and that abortion and what has happened to Roe v. Wade was, on some level, an example of how Republicans have distorted democracy. And that’s how it resonated with swing voters to back Democrats. Intertwined issues rather than distinct ones — is that fair?

Yeah. I think you can go back to the messaging that was coming from the White House, some of which was mocked, which is that Joe Biden, early in 2022, started using the word ultra MAGA.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Then this was not an accidental label. This is a label that had come through months of research by groups aligned with the White House saying, look, we made word clouds of what Democratic talkers said about the Republican Party, and it looks like a mess. Nothing pops out.

We see all these different words — spineless, supremacist, democracy, cowardly, petrified, race, culture, wars, identity, politics, divisive. But they’re all around the same size. There’s no singular message.

And what we need is a label, a label that we can put on the Republican Party that voters already associate with negative things. And the research came up that MAGA, which is a term that the Republican Party had embraced, that MAGA was actually an effective tool to lump these things together in the minds of voters because voters already were lumping them together.

Mm-hmm. And voters already intuitively felt Republicans were changing.

They felt that they were changing. And they felt that this MAGA label, the Trump-embraced MAGA label, in this research, it meant already radical and extreme and power hungry. So the Dobbs decision leaks, and Joe Biden rolls out this ultra MAGA label. And it told voters that a big change was coming, that a Supreme Court was, in the view of many Democrats, radically rewriting what was the law for 50 years around abortion. And so yeah, it fit into that messaging frame. And I’m not saying that this was a brilliant plan, that the White House had concocted to come up with this just before this happened, right? Some of this is happenstance. But what is true is that Joe Biden went from that 2020 race, where he was talking exclusively about Trump, to a broader label. And some of the reporting I’ve done shows that it wasn’t easy, necessarily, for him to come to using a label, right? He is a label-averse kind of a guy.

Yeah.

He is a Senator who reached across the aisle, who prizes his relationship with Republicans, who is proud of the fact that he got some Republicans to line up with him on an infrastructure package, right? He is not the first person to go use words to label the party writ large.

But he came to this in part from some conversations he’d had with historians. So Biden meets with historians at the White House occasionally. And they told him that, according to a person who’s spoken with Biden about this, that this kind of labeling, that it’s effective. And it has been effective throughout history at sort of battling far-right factions. And so Biden did really come to embrace it.

And interestingly, after Biden embraced this kind of label, so did Trump, right? He slapped ultra MAGA on a T-shirt. He slapped it on wine glasses and pint glasses. And he says, I’m your MAGA king, just days before the election. And so if you’re trying to push out a message that this party is this thing, and the other party wraps themselves up in it too, it helps promote the message, right? And the combination was that it stuck, that I think for —

Well —

Oh, go on.

No, no, no. I want you to finish. But I’m saying, I’m sure in the Trump Republican head, they thought that this was going to be another basket-of-deplorables moment, to go back to 2016, that they could use a label that came from Democrats and actually use it as something that they can embrace branding-wise to drive energy among the base. I think the key difference here is while in 2016, independents, swing voters did not like the Democratic options and did not view the Republicans as radical, in this case, MAGA Republicans is, in fact, something that they ended up punishing Republicans for.

I mean, I think the biggest challenge for Trump in 2022 and going into 2024 is the idea of Donald Trump was deeply appealing to the middle in 2016, the middle that was really unhappy with where the country was and was ready —

100 percent.

— to just break things, right? When you talked to voters in 2016, voters were talking about upending the system. And he was the candidate who they thought would do it. And it was a risky bet, but you know what? Let’s just do it. It’s time. And they saw what that looked like. They had four years of it. And when it comes to denying the election, they saw a pretty ugly result at the end of those four years. This has not showed up in polling, and it’s really one of those things that’s impossible to test, but I am really curious about how the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband played at the very end of the cycle.

I am too. I really think this was a late break from those independent moderates, and something happened in the last couple of weeks. And that was a real example of that extremism and violence.

Yeah. It’s hard not to overlook that this political cycle began with violence and ended with violence, right? Democrats took control of the Senate on January 5, 2021. And on January 6, the Capitol riot happens, right? It is the first full day the Democrats are now going to be in control of Washington.

Now, they hadn’t taken formal control yet, but the first full day. And at the very end of the cycle, you had another example of political violence and the break-in of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which was not met with the kind of universal condemnation by the Republican Party that it might have once been. It was met with some conspiracy theories spreading at the highest levels. The break-in —

It was met with jokes by some candidates on the ballot for Tuesday.

It was met with jokes by some. It was met with mocking by others. There were memes that was pushed out by Donald Trump Jr. The idea that the country was moving toward a place where the octogenarian husband of the House Speaker could be in their own home, somebody could break in, a politically motivated assailant could break in, threatening to potentially kidnap the House Speaker, and bludgeon her husband with a hammer —

Again, there’s not polling to show the impact of this, but it’s one of those moments that almost everyone in the country heard about. And it’s hard not to imagine that it didn’t have some impact on the psyche of voters as they went to the polls. Again, I don’t have any way to show that yet, and I’m not even sure how you would, but it just feels like the kind of moment that matters.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. In 2016, people agreed with Trump that the system was broken and that the establishment was totally out of touch. But in 2022, there is not that same level of agreement, particularly when what has become of the Republican establishment now represents a openly, at least in this cycle, anti-democratic wing. It seems like a key question here then, is to what extent should we see this as a Democratic victory versus a Republican loss, that the GOP just handed them this huge advantage in the form of Trumpism, in the form of extremist positions, in the form of out-of-touch candidates?

Can you ask that again?

[LAUGHS] To what extent did Democrats win this? And to what extent did Republicans lose this?

Yes. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHS]

I mean, I don’t know that there’s a clear answer to that question. There’s never just one side of an election, that just one side won and one side lost. I think that what is clear is that that embrace of Trump without Trump on the ballot was not helpful. And I think that that’s something worth looking at too, which is that for all the talk of the downsides of Trump this year — and there’s a lot of talk among Republicans about the downsides of Trump this year — there is an argument from Trump allies that what they really needed was Trump himself.

Yeah.

The problem wasn’t —

That everyone else is doing diet Trump, and what —

Yes.

— people want is the pure, unfiltered stuff.

That there’s no substitute for the real thing, right? And so by the way, this is a calculus that House Democrats made at the very beginning of the cycle. They did a big study of what went wrong in 2020. So House Democrats lost seats in 2020. They are likely to have lost more seats in 2020 than they lost in 2022, in a year where everyone is expecting them to lose a bunch of seats.

So after that 2020 race, they set off on this big internal study. They called it the Deep Dive. And in this study, one of the findings they had was, we think, that Trump is a minus, Trump is a big political loser, because Trump’s base doesn’t turn out.

And so in this big PowerPoint presentation that they presented to their conference early in 2021, they had a few slides talking about this exact question and said, what’s going to happen if he’s not there? And one of the side questions they had — and I’ll read it to you — is, will this Trump toxicity work without Trump turnout?

These are negative things that Trump has brought about for his party, but he also had an upside. He brought out people who otherwise weren’t voting. And so in the post mortem that’s happening, I think it can get lost that there are people inside the Republican Party who don’t see the lesson as less Trump. They see the lesson as more Trump. And that’s playing out right now as House Republicans select their leadership team for the coming Congress.

That does feel like the core question facing the Republican Party right now, not just what to do about Donald Trump as an individual, but what are the defining features of Trumpism? And how much does that have a place among the Republican base? As Donald Trump makes his presidential announcement, this is what the party is asking itself.

Yeah, and it’s going to ask itself in two key places simultaneously over the next two years. Place one is the campaign trail, where the question will be, do people run against Trump, and how many of them, because he won, again, the 2016 Republican primary through a fractured field, right? That was not a majority of the Republicans. But he still holds an almost exclusive hold on 35 percent to 40 percent of the Republican Party. And so when I’ve talked to Republicans, the question is, how many want to run? Well, they’re all afraid that too many of them would run, and the chance if one strong one gets in, then many of them will get in, and then he skates through a divided field. So it will happen on the campaign trail, but it’s also going to be happening on Capitol Hill, where I don’t think we should forget that even if Republicans had a deeply disappointing night, they are on track to have the House majority.

And once they have the House majority, they have subpoena power. They have ability to pass legislation. They have an ability to set their own agenda separate from Donald Trump. To the extent that Kevin McCarthy as potential House Speaker is able to muscle through legislation, he can put out legislation that would define what a Republican Party could stand for separate and in addition to Donald Trump.

He could initiate investigations into the Biden administration that would define what the party stands for separate and in addition to Donald Trump. So the question of what does the party become, it’s going to happen in two places at once.

Mm-hmm. It feels like, to your point about the campaign trail and about Capitol Hill, it’s really a question about Republican voters themselves. Donald Trump, from every indication I’ve ever had about the man, is going to say the things that he has always said. To me, what seems to be the open question is whether that 30 percent to 35 percent that has been so tied to him responds to those messages in the same way and, to your point about Capitol Hill, whether they’re pressuring the Republican House to really play out Trump’s grievances, because what we could be defining as Trumpism could be just what the Republican base believes in, whether Donald Trump is leading the charge or not.

Well, Astead, I think you know this better than almost any other political reporter, which is they call themselves political leaders, but, in many cases, politicians are political followers. They’re following where the votes are. They’re following where their base is. They’re following the first election they face in every election, which is the primary. Their chief concern politically is their own base. And so where the base of the Democratic Party goes and where the base of the Republican Party goes, so goes the party itself in general.

Mm, mm-hmm. As we said, there’s an open question about that Republican base. But to your point about the Democratic base, what should they take from the results on this Tuesday? I mean, on one hand, there is a universal understanding of Democrats beating expectations, of overperforming, of really succeeding using, as we talked about, that language of Republican extremism and protecting democracy and abortion rights.

But at the same time, with all of those things kind of breaking the Democrats’ way over the last couple of weeks, they still will face a Republican House, and they still face a Democratic base that has shown real signs of erosion and continued to show some of them in these midterms. If you are the Democratic Party after the glow of this midterms, what fades off, how should you view the state of where Democrats are right now?

Well, I think that the best thing to do sometimes is actually to listen to the politicians. And Joe Biden had a press conference right after the election. He was asked, given the results, given some of the unhappiness in the country, what would you do differently? And one of the very first words he said was nothing.

[LAUGHS]

He said he didn’t want to do anything differently. And when you talk to people around the White House, they say the Republicans weren’t actually running against our agenda. They didn’t run against the specific policies that we pursued. So the White House doesn’t feel like their agenda was rejected.

But when we’ve talked about what did Democrats run on, we’ve talked about it almost as if they were the opposition party. They were running to stop a set of Republican priorities. And so I think it’s a real open question what the agenda is for the second half of Joe Biden’s first term.

And beyond that, there are already questions about who the party standard bearer should be in the future. As much as there are nagging concerns about Joe Biden’s age, there are deeper concerns among Democrats about the idea of running against Donald Trump again. And the same reason that Democrats came to Joe Biden in the first place might be the reason they rally around him again, which is he is still the only Democrat to have beaten Donald Trump. And his candidacy is very much pitched on that he’s the candidate who can do it again.

Right, right. On one hand, you have an electorate who, even while backing Democrats in this midterms in historic fashion, did so while reporting that they weren’t that satisfied with the president and the party in power, that they were doing so in spite of President Biden, not because of him. I’ve talked to so many Democratic voters who tell me they’re sick of their party offering themselves as just not Republicans. But at the same time, the strongest bond between Democratic voters, the biggest motivator for Democratic voters, the biggest money driver for the voters Democrats need, seems to be pitching themselves as not Donald Trump and the Republicans.

If you think about what are the two successful political coalitions that Democrats have mobilized in the last 15 years, the first was Barack Obama’s political coalition of hope and change. The second is a stop-Trump coalition. And that came together first in the 2018 midterms. It came together again in 2020 with the election of Joe Biden.

And it showed its strength in an unlikely and unexpected way in these midterms, where Democrats are still expected to lose the House, but by such a small margin that it wasn’t really a repudiation, and to hold or even gain seats in the Senate. And so there’s tension among Democrats for what the party should stand for, but there’s broad agreement that stopping Trump is the recipe to unite the party.

Just days before Joe Biden secured the Democratic nomination, he described himself, I think for the first time, as a transitional figure. He was running to transition the Democrats to a new future. And right now, we know what the present is. And the present is that he can lead a stop-Trump coalition. But what we don’t know is what that future looks like and who’s leading it.

Mm. Thank you, Shane. I really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

So the midterms have left both parties in a moment of reflection. For Democrats, it’s about how much of their future is inherently tied to Republicans. And for Republicans, it’s a level of introspection similar to what they faced after their loss in 2012, when they concluded that the country was changing, and the party wasn’t changing with it.

Donald Trump provided an unexpected solution to that problem. But in doing so, he transformed the party into a reflection of its grassroots base, a base that’s grown increasingly extreme and anti-democratic. And so these midterms are forcing the party to make a choice.

USA! USA! USA!

But in the end —

USA!

Well, thank you very much. And on behalf of Melania, myself, and our entire family, I want to thank you all for being here tonight. It’s a very special occasion.

— the choice may not be theirs to make.

In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.

So while we started by asking how strong Americans’ commitment to democracy really is, the midterms have only begun to offer an answer. And they’ve opened up a whole new set of questions.

See you next year on “The Run-Up.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

“The Run-Up” is reported by me, Astead Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez and Caitlin O’Keefe. It’s edited by Frannie Carr Toth, Larissa Anderson, and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Elisheba Ittoop. It was mixed by Corey Schreppel and fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, David Halbfinger, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Shannon Busta, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda and Maddy Masiello.

And one last thanks to you, the listener. We are deeply appreciative that you’ve chosen to go on this journey with us. And we’ll see you back here in a few months. Thanks again, y’all.

Carl Hulse

Follow the latest news on Nancy Pelosi stepping down from leadership.

WASHINGTON — Nancy Pelosi, the dominant political operator, legislative tactician and face of House Democrats for two decades, and the first woman to serve as speaker, announced on Thursday that she would leave the leadership ranks in January following narrow election losses that cost Democrats their majority, but would remain in Congress.

Ms. Pelosi, the Californian who twice led Democrats to power in the House and has been a central figure in the major legislative accomplishments of the Obama and Biden administrations, disclosed her plans in a carefully choreographed midday speech on the House floor a day after Republicans clinched control of the chamber.

“For me, the hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect,” Ms. Pelosi said as some of her colleagues wiped tears from their eyes. “And I am grateful that so many are ready and willing to shoulder this awesome responsibility.”

Her decision represented a transformative moment for House Democrats, and it set off a rapid and long-anticipated shift in the top ranks of Democratic leadership — now dominated by a trio of octogenarians — toward a younger group that has been waiting in the wings.

Shortly after Ms. Pelosi, 82, concluded her remarks, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the 83-year-old majority leader, said in a letter to his colleagues that he too would refrain from seeking a leadership position in the next Congress. He endorsed Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, 52, to be the next Democratic leader, throwing his support to a lawmaker who is widely regarded as Ms. Pelosi’s likeliest successor.

The No. 3 Democrat, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, 82, was expected to cede the position of whip and seek to become the assistant leader, according to people familiar with the plans who spoke about them on the condition of anonymity because they had yet to be announced.

Mr. Jeffries and Representatives Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, 59, and Pete Aguilar of California, 43, were widely expected to seek the top three spots.

Ms. Pelosi, in an interview with reporters after her speech, said she did not intend to endorse any successor, saying it was “really important for people to have the legitimacy that they were chosen by the members and they make their own, shall we say, prioritizing issues.”

“They will have their vision,” she said. “They will have their plan.”

Her carefully calculated departure reflected the tight grip she has maintained on House Democrats over decades, rarely ceding control to her colleagues, brooking little dissent and leaving few things to chance.

Ms. Pelosi pledged in 2018 to limit herself to four more years as her party’s leader, but had recently equivocated, and had been quietly gauging her support within Democratic ranks. Several of her colleagues had privately noted that Ms. Pelosi was unlikely to seek to stay in her position if she found she did not have the votes to do so, and equally unlikely to leave if she believed she had the backing to hold on.

But Ms. Pelosi insisted she would have had the support to remain if she had opted to; she said her phone had been “exploding” with calls from her colleagues urging her to stay as their leader, but that she had chosen otherwise. The decision came less than three weeks after her husband, Paul Pelosi, was brutally attacked in their San Francisco home by a hammer-wielding assailant who was said to have been planning to kidnap and assault the speaker herself.

Though she will remain in the House, the outgoing speaker also said she did not plan to peer over the shoulders of the new leaders and offer advice, as some people close to her had speculated.

“I have no intention of being the mother-in-law in the kitchen saying, ‘My son doesn’t like this thing this way,’” said Ms. Pelosi, who said she would focus her energy instead on representing the city that had first sent her to the House in 1987.

“I want to afford myself the joy of being able to deal with the needs of the people of San Francisco,” she added during the interview.

Ms. Pelosi’s announcement heralded the end of a historic leadership run for a woman who had learned the nitty-gritty of politics from her family in Baltimore, where her father was a congressman and later mayor. She rose to prominence in California as the leader of the state party; at 47, after being a stay-at-home mother to five children, won election to the House from San Francisco; and finally became the determined force at the helm of House Democrats.

With her in a leadership role, Democrats challenged President George W. Bush over the Iraq war and his plan to privatize Social Security, and won approval of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, her greatest legislative achievement, in 2010. She helped steer the nation through a grave economic crisis in 2008, and this year finished her leadership stint by passing legacy-building climate change legislation.

Her tenure was not without its difficulties. She lost her gavel the first time in the midterm elections of 2010, when severe losses cost her party the House majority, and some Democrats urged her to step aside; she ran for leader anyway, and won. When she returned to the speakership in 2018, she sometimes clashed with a newly elected group of progressive women of color who chafed under her leadership and suggested her time had come and gone.

Over her many years atop her party, Ms. Pelosi, the most powerful woman in American politics, became a favorite target for Republicans, who demonized and dehumanized her in increasingly ugly terms. During her remarks on Thursday in the House chamber, there was standing room only on the Democratic side, but only a few Republicans were on hand to listen to her.

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, attended along with some newly elected G.O.P. members. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who is seeking to succeed her as speaker, skipped it, while some other G.O.P. lawmakers took the opportunity to gloat publicly that their efforts to “Fire Pelosi” had succeeded.

In her speech, Ms. Pelosi recounted the arc of her career — “from homemaker to House speaker,” she said — as well as her major legislative accomplishments. She also addressed the fragility of the nation’s democracy as she recalled the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, carried out by an angry mob who rejected the results of the 2020 election and President Donald J. Trump’s loss. But, she added, voters “stood in the breach and repelled the assault on democracy” last week by rejecting candidates who continued to cast doubt on the 2020 election.

In a statement released after Ms. Pelosi’s speech, President Biden said history would remember her as “the most consequential speaker of the House of Representatives in our history.”

“There are countless examples of how she embodies the obligation of elected officials to uphold their oath to God and country to ensure our democracy delivers and remains a beacon to the world,” he said. “In everything she does, she reflects a dignity in her actions and a dignity she sees in the lives of the people of this nation.”

In the interview, Ms. Pelosi said she had considered leaving the leadership ranks in the past but had been driven to help her party in this election following the assault on the Capitol and the spread of election denialism.

“What was important to me was how we did in the election, because we were really on a bad path,” she said.

Ms. Pelosi was for years the focus of bitter attacks from Republicans who used her as a symbol of liberal Democratic ideology. But she was revered within her own party — and earned the respect of many Republicans — for her leadership skills, steadiness in times of crisis, political acumen and, not least, a formidable ability to tap donors for hundreds of millions of dollars. Aides calculated that she had raised $310 million this election cycle for her party and a total of nearly $1.3 billion during her 20 years in leadership.

On Thursday, Mr. McCarthy offered no comment on Ms. Pelosi’s announcement, though his staff noted that they expected that her final act as speaker would be to hand him the gavel in January, as is tradition in a handover of power in the House.

But Ms. Pelosi, who has made little secret of her disdain for Mr. McCarthy, said she would leave that task to the Democrat chosen to replace her as party leader.

Some Republicans offered statements of respect for Ms. Pelosi, but minutes after she concluded her remarks, Derrick Van Orden, an incoming Republican congressman from Wisconsin who rallied at the Capitol on Jan. 6, tweeted a photo of himself on the campaign trail holding a sign that said “FIRE PELOSI.” “Promises Made. Promises Kept,” Mr. Van Orden wrote.

As Ms. Pelosi closed her remarks, House members rose to give her a standing ovation. She was swarmed by colleagues kissing her on the cheek and giving her hugs, and embraced a young girl who was in the chamber for her speech — a moment reminiscent of her swearing-in as speaker, when she called all the children present in the chamber to the dais.

She made it clear that she and her family have struggled to deal with the effects of the attack on Mr. Pelosi, which she noted had turned her residence into a crime scene. She said she believed that public disgust at the attack swung voters to Democratic candidates on Nov. 8.

“The traumatic effect of that being in our home has had such an impact on my husband and me, but also on our children and grandchildren,” she said, expressing fury at Republicans and others for making light of the incident.

“Just think if your spouse were in a situation where other people would make a joke of it, think it was funny,” she said. “It’s so horrible to think the Republican Party has come down to this, and no real rejection of it by anybody in the party. It’s so sad for our country.”

Rather than leading her to consider leaving Congress entirely, Ms. Pelosi said the attack had fortified her decision to stay.

“I couldn’t give them that satisfaction,” she said.

Carl Hulse

Republicans managed to make their victory in the House seem like a loss by underperforming so badly. But while they did not win control by anywhere near the margin that they anticipated, they did win. And in the House, even the barest majority can work its will if it can hold together to produce 218 votes.

The main question going forward is whether Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who was nominated on Tuesday to lead the new Republican majority, can achieve the unity necessary to perform fundamental tasks such as funding the government, or whether unyielding far-right members will make the new speaker’s life miserable and the House an unmanageable mess.

The likely single-digit-seat victory will allow Republicans to claim power — including subpoena power — set the agenda, run the committees and try to hold President Biden’s feet to the fire with a string of promised investigations.

Despite their underwhelming showing, Republicans are unlikely to be chastened into cooperating with Mr. Biden and no doubt will plunge ahead aggressively once they get their hands on the gavels. For many, that was the point of the election. Their agenda is investigative, not legislative.

For Mr. McCarthy, his party’s win came in the worst possible way. The much thinner than expected majority means fewer Republicans from swing districts who might be averse to provoking chaos, making him more reliant on the fire-breathing hard-right members who triumphed in safe, ruby-red districts on the promise of political warfare against Mr. Biden.

Reid J. Epstein, Lisa Lerer and Jonathan Weisman

Three billionaire donors have moved on and others are actively weighing their options. A number of former allies are staying on the sidelines. A long list of potential rivals — from popular governors to members of Congress — are seriously assessing their chances for 2024. Even his own daughter has declined to get involved.

Within hours of Donald J. Trump announcing his third presidential bid on Tuesday, some of his former aides, donors and staunchest allies are shunning his attempt to recapture the White House, an early sign that he may face difficulty winning the support of a Republican Party still reeling from unexpected midterm losses.

While Mr. Trump has long faced opposition from the establishment and elite quarters of his party, this round of criticism was new in its raw bluntness, plainly out in the open by Wednesday and focused on reminding voters that the Trump era in Republican politics has led to the opposite of the endless winning Mr. Trump once promised.

“The message he delivered last night — which was self-serving, which was chaotic — was the same one that lost the last election cycle and would lose the next,” said Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, a Republican and Trump critic who spoke Wednesday from Iowa, where he is testing the waters for a presidential run in 2024. “We need alternatives.”

A growing chorus of Republican officials, lawmakers and activists blame the former president for their failure to regain control of the Senate and for what will be a narrow margin in the House.

The scope of the Republican losses has prompted some of his allies to publicly voice complaints they have long kept private about the former president’s ability to win the White House. For those who have been more vocal, their concerns have morphed into far more direct attacks as they try to seize what they see as a chance to move past Mr. Trump and embrace a new class of party leaders.

Linda Qiu

Highlighted passages are false or inaccurate. Highlighted passages are false or inaccurate.

Thank you very much and on behalf of Melania, myself and our entire family, I want to thank you all for being here tonight. It’s a very special occasion at a very special place. You and all of those watching are the heart and soul of this incredible movement, the greatest country in the history of the world. It’s very simple. There’s never been anything like it, this great movement of ours. Never been anything like it, And perhaps there will never be anything like it again. There’s never been anything to compete with what we have all done.

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, and my fellow citizens, America’s comeback starts right now — America’s comeback starts right now.

Two years ago, when I left office, the United States stood ready for its golden age. Our nation was at the pinnacle of power, prosperity and prestige, towering above all rivals, vanquishing all enemies and striding into the future confident and so strong.

In four short years, everybody was doing great: men, women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, everybody was thriving like never before.

There was never a time like this. We turned the page on decades of globalists, sellouts and one-sided trade deals. Lifted millions out of poverty and together we built the greatest economy in the history of the world. When the virus hit our shores, I took decisive action and saved lives and the U.S. economy. And by October of the same year, America was roaring back with the No. 1 fastest economic recovery ever recorded. How about that?

All of the incoming administration and all they had to do was just sit back and watch. Inflation was nonexistent. Our southern border was by far the strongest ever. And because the border was so tight, drugs were coming into our country at the lowest level in many, many years. Importantly, after decades of rising energy costs, the United States had finally obtained the impossible dream of American energy independence, which soon would have turned into energy dominance.

For the first time in memory, China was reeling and back on its heels. I had never seen that before, because the United States was outdoing them on every single front and China was paying billions and billions of dollars on taxes and tariffs. The farmers know that because they got 28 billion of it. No president had ever sought or received one dollar for our country from China until I came along and we were getting hundreds of billions of dollars. Many people think that because of this, China played a very active role in the 2020 election. Just saying. Just saying. I am sure that didn’t happen. Instead of jobs in factories leaving America for China, they were for the first time ever leaving China for America.

Businesses were pouring back because of our historic tax and regulation cuts, the biggest in both categories in history, bigger even than what Ronald Reagan was able to produce, and he produced a lot. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea were in check. Respected. They respected the United States. And quite honestly, they respected me. I knew them well. I knew them well.

The vicious ISIS caliphate, which no president was able to conquer, was decimated by me and our great warriors. In less than three weeks, al-Baghdadi, its founder, was hunted down and killed. North Korea had not launched a single long-range missile since my summit with chairman Kim Jong-un, nearly three years before we developed a relationship. And that's a good thing, not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Very good thing, actually. Because look at what is happening today. My opponents made me out to be a warmonger and just a terrible person who would immediately go into war. They said during the 2016 campaign that if he becomes president, there will never be a war within weeks. We will have wars like you've never seen before. It will happen immediately. And yet, I have gone decades, decades, without a war. The first president to do it for that long a period.

The world was at peace, America was prospering, and our country was on track for an amazing future, because I made big promises to the American people, and unlike other presidents, I kept my promises. I kept them.

Thank you very much. Under our leadership, we were a great and glorious nation, something you haven’t heard for quite a long period of time. We were a strong nation and importantly, we were a free nation. But now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. For millions of Americans, the past two years under Joe Biden have been a time of pain, hardship, anxiety and despair. As we speak, inflation is the highest in over 50 years. Gas prices have reached the highest levels in history and expect them to go much higher, now that the strategic national reserves, which I filled up, have been virtually drained in order to keep gasoline prices lower, just prior to the election. Joe Biden has intentionally surrendered our energy independence. There is no longer even a thought of dominance, and we are now begging for energy help from foreign nations, many of whom find us detestable. Our southern border has been erased and our country is being invaded by millions and millions of unknown people, many of whom are entering for a very bad and sinister reason.

And you know what that reason is. We will be paying a big price for this invasion in our country for years to come. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of deadly drugs, including very lethal fentanyl, are flooding across the now open and totally porous southern border. The bloodsoaked streets of our once great cities are cesspools of violent crimes, which are being watched all over the world, as leadership of other countries explain that this is what America and democracy is really all about. How sad. The United States has been embarrassed, humiliated and weakened for all to see. The disasters in Afghanistan, perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, where we lost lives, left Americans behind, and surrendered $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world.

And Ukraine, which would have never happened if I were your president – are something —

And even the Democrats admit that. That's something I have seen them admit over and over again. But our enemies are speaking of us with scorn and laughter and derision because of those two events. But there are many more, even just today, a missile was sent in probably by Russia, to Poland, 50 miles into Poland. And people are going absolutely wild and crazy and they are not happy. They are very, very angry.

Now we have a president who falls asleep at global conferences. Was held in contempt by the British Parliament over Afghanistan. Thanks to the words of wisdom, he said thank you to the wrong country for inviting him to a major summit on the environment, of all things.

They fly for days to get there and then he calls the country a name that was actually a country on another continent. He is leading us to the brink of nuclear war, a concept unimaginable just two short years ago. You cannot mention the nuclear word. It is too devastating. The Green New Deal and the environment, which they say may affect us in 300 years is all that is talked about. And yet nuclear weapons, which would destroy the world immediately, are never even discussed as a major threat. Can you imagine? They say the ocean will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years. But don’t worry about nuclear weapons that can take out entire countries with one shot. Something is wrong with their thinking. Under Biden and the radical Democrats, America has been mocked, derided and brought to its knees, perhaps like never before.

But we are here tonight to declare that it does not have to be this way. It does not have to be this way.

Two years ago, we were a great nation and soon, we will be a great nation again.

The decline of America is being forced upon us by Biden and the radical left lunatics running our government right into the ground. This decline is not a fate we must accept. When given the choice, boldly, clearly and directly, I believe the American people will overwhelmingly reject the left’s platform of national ruin. And they will embrace our platform of national greatness and glory to America, glory.

Exactly one week ago, our citizens voted in the important midterm elections. Despite a ridiculously long and unnecessary period of waiting, far longer in fact than any third-world country, just a short time ago, the Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives.

And it was with a great Trump-endorsed candidate, Congressman-elect Kevin Kiley, who was a fantastic person, a fantastic person.

And I am very happy it was his vote that did it. So we now won back — this happened just an hour ago. Much criticism is being placed on the fact that the Republican Party should have done better. And frankly, much of this blame is correct. But the citizens of our country have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through. And the total effect of the suffering is just starting to take hold. They don’t quite feel it yet, but they will very soon. I have no doubt that by 2024, it will sadly be much worse and they will see much more clearly what happened and what is happening to our country and the voting will be much different. 2024.

Are you getting ready?

And I am, too. I am, too. I do want to point out that in the midterms, my endorsement success rate was 232 wins and only 22 losses. You don't hear that from the media.

This is an elegant night and an elegant press place. And I am not going to use the term “fake news media.” So we are going to keep it very elegant, but you don't hear that from the media. But I think you will because people are starting to see what happened.

That score, in the primaries, it was 98.6 percent. But they were still trying to blame me. And the reason for the success and that unprecedented success rate is that the Trump administration changed our nation on trade, on securing the border with the strongest safest border ever in the history of our country, on Islamic terrorism, we had practically just about, not that I can think of, no Islamic attacks, terrorist attacks during the Trump administration. In fact, we got along well with the various countries.

Including coming up with the Abraham accords. It’s a great thing. But it is because of cutting taxes and regulations at the highest level ever and building the greatest economy. Any time in the history of the world, there has never been an economy like we had just two years ago. Despite the outcome in the Senate, we cannot lose hope and we must all work very hard for a gentleman and a great person named Herschel Walker, a fabulous human being, who loves our country and will be a great United States senator. Herschel Walker.

Get out and vote for Herschel. He deserves it. He was an incredible athlete. He’ll be an even better senator. Get out and vote for Herschel Walker. We elected a group of incredibly talented America First leaders who will be stars of our party for many years to come. In the popular vote, another thing that’s not discussed for the House, we must remember that Republicans won five million more votes, the largest margin in many, many years over the Democrats, five million more votes. That’s a big thing. Breaking the radical Democrats’ grip on Congress was crucial. So in other words, because of our great congressman and all of our great congressmen and congresswomen, we have taken over Congress. Nancy Pelosi has been fired.

I told them, I said, “If you just keep a little bit lower standard, you are going to have a big victory.” They said let's win by 40 seats, let’s win by 50. I said, “If you win by two seats, be happy.” But she's on her way to another country right now. She’s been fired.

But we always had known that this was not the end. It was only the beginning of our fight to rescue the American dream. And it's a word you don't use, it's two words, I don't want to be Joe. It’s two words: American dream. That was not good what he did, a lot of bad things. Like going to Idaho and saying welcome to the state of Florida, I really love it. In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States.

Thank you, all of you. So many incredible friends and family here tonight. It’s such a beautiful thing. Some people say, “How do you speak before so many people all the time?” When there is love in the room, it is really easy. You ought to try it sometime. Together, we will be taking on the most corrupt forces and entrenched interests imaginable. Our country is in a horrible state. We are in grave trouble. This is not a task for a politician or conventional candidate. This is a task for a great movement that embodies the courage, confidence and the spirit of the American people. This is a movement, this is not for any one individual. This is a job for tens of millions of proud people working together from all across the land and from all walks of life: young and old, Black and white, Hispanic and Asian, many of whom we have brought together for the very, very first time.

If you look at the numbers, if you look at what’s happened with Hispanic, with African American, with Asian, just look at what’s happening, this is a party that has become much bigger, much stronger, much more powerful, can do much more good for our country. This is a job for grandmothers and construction workers, firefighters, builders, teachers, doctors and farmers who cannot stay quiet any longer. You cannot stay quiet any longer. You’re angry about what is happening to our country. Our country is being destroyed before your very eyes.

It’s a job for every aspiring young person and every hard-working parent, for every entrepreneur and underappreciated police officer who was ready to shout for safety in America. The police are being treated so badly. These are great people that can straighten out the crime. They are the ones who know how to do it. We have to give them back their respect and dignity.

This will not be my campaign. This will be our campaign, all together.

Because the only force strong enough to defeat the massive corruption we are up against is you, the American people. It’s true. The American people, the greatest people on earth. We love them all, we love both sides. We are going to bring people together. We are going to unify people. And it was happening in the previous administration, and what was bringing them together was success. Prior to Covid coming in, the people were calling me, that were calling me, you wouldn’t believe it. People that were so far left, I figured they would never speak to me and I would never speak to them, but our success was so incredible, like never before. And then Covid started coming in from China. We call it the China virus. Some people call it other things. But it was devastating, and we built it back and did an incredible job. But when people say Republicans or Democrats or liberals or conservatives, I say we can get together. And we were doing that. That was happening just prior.

Because the success was greater than this country has ever had. We were leapfrogging China and leapfrogging everyone else and everyone wanted a piece of it. But just as I promised in 2016, I am your voice. I am your voice.

The Washington establishment wants to silence us, but we will not let them do that. What we have built together over the past six years is the greatest movement in history because it is not about politics, it’s about our love for this great country, America. And we’re not going to let it fail. I am running because I believe the world has not yet seen the true glory of what this nation can be. We have not reached that pinnacle, believe it or not. In fact, we can go very far.

We’re going to have to go far. First we have to get out of this ditch. Once we are out, you will see things that nobody has imagined for any country. It’s called the United States of America. It’s an incredible place.

We are Americans, and we do not have to endure what has taken place in Washington, D.C. This is our country, our government. And the corridors of power, they are our corridors. They are not their corridors, these are our corridors. We are coming to take those corridors back.

From now on until Election Day in 2024 — which will come very quickly, we will go, “Look at how time flies. Look at how fast it is all going,” — I will fight like no one has ever fought before. We will defeat the radical left Democrats that are trying to destroy our country from within. And likewise protect us all, we want to protect us. We have to be protected from all of those nations out there that are looking to destroy us from beyond our shores. There are lots of nations that hate us, gravely. And that’s the problem.

When they look at us in disarray like we are now, when we go to them begging for oil and we have more liquid gold under our feet than they have, or any other nation has, and we don’t use it because we’re going to them? It's crazy what is happening. We can’t let it continue. Joe Biden is the face of left-wing failure and Washington corruption.

He had a big G20 dinner tonight. Everyone flew over to wherever they flew over. And guess what? He never showed up. They're still looking for him. What’s going on?

G20, I used to love that. The leaders, I used to make deals for our country like you wouldn’t believe. It was one, give me the next one, give me the next one. We got them to stop taking advantage of our country. Every nation took advantage of our country. We renegotiated deals with Mexico and Canada, USMCA, we got rid of the worst trade deal ever made. Ever made. NAFTA, the worst trade deal ever made. That is why the farmers love Trump. Because we did a great job. The manufacturers also. We did a deal, we restructured our terrible deal – terrible deal – with Japan. I did it with Prime Minister Abe, a great man, who, unfortunately, it’s so sad, he was a great friend of mine, great man, loved his country so much. We restructured and made it a really terrific deal. With South Korea and other countries.

The best of all is what we did with China. We made an incredible deal. But after Covid, I don't even bother talking about it, because the devastation that it caused the entire world was too much to bear. I will ensure that Joe Biden does not receive four more years in 2020. Can’t do it.

Our country could not take that. I say that not in laughter, I say that in tears. Our country could not take four more years. It can only take so much. It’s all very fragile to start off with. It can only take so much. In 2020, I received the largest number of votes of any sitting president in history. By a lot. And we will do it again, but with even more votes this time.

Many have noted the huge gains we have made with Latino voters. And I believe we will set even greater records with this crucial vote in 2024.

The Hispanic voter, the Latino voter, has been unbelievable. Great people. Very entrepreneurial people. And they want security. Everyone thought when I did the wall, when I built the wall, they thought it would hurt me with the Hispanic vote. No, it helped me because they understood. They wanted safety. They wanted security. They understood the border better than anybody else. So they were amazed that we started that trend and now we are continuing with that trend. Look at what we have done in Florida and what everybody is now doing in Florida. In Texas, along the border in Texas, won every single community. I won every single community.

The governor of Texas called, great gentlemen just got re-elected. He said to me, “I would like to talk to you for a second. I said you've done something no one else has done. You’ve won every single area along the border. The longest since Reconstruction.” I said, “Reconstruction? I guess you call that the Civil War.” That’s what I call it. That’s what I call it.

Governor Abbott, very good man. It's horrible because what is happening is they are sending hundreds of thousands of people right through his state, right through Arizona, right through all of the states. What is happening is they are coming up all of the states. And we can’t have it anymore. This campaign will be about issues, vision and success and we will not stop. We will not quit until we achieve the highest goals and make our country greater than it has ever been before. We can do that. We can do it.

Our victory will be built upon big ideas, bold ambitions and daring dreams for America’s future. We need daring dreams, it is not enough merely to complain or oppose. We don't want to be critics, we don’t want to be complainers. I never wanted to be a critic. I never respected critics. They tell people what is wrong but they can't do it themselves. We will win, because we will fight with every measure of our strength, with every ounce of our energy, to lift up the working men and the working women of America and restore the fabric of this nation. The radical left Democrats have embraced an extreme ideology of government domination and control. Our approach is the opposite: one based on freedom, values, individual responsibility, and just plain common sense. It’s common sense.

In two years, the Biden administration has destroyed the U.S. economy. Just destroyed it. With victory, we will again build the greatest economy ever. It'll take place quickly. We will build the greatest economy ever. And if you remember, I did it twice. I did it before Covid and handed off something where the stock market was higher than just prior to Covid coming in.

And we did it twice and we will do it again, but this time we will do it bigger, stronger, better than anybody could ever imagine.

One of the beautiful things of the polls, if there is such a thing, a beautiful thing, one of the important factors of the polls, is that we see how bad they’ve done. We will be able to do it properly and it will be much easier. Everybody will agree with us because everybody sees what a bad job that has been done during this two-year period and it will be a four-year period. Everybody sees that. It will be much easier for us to do what has to be done.

We will immediately tackle inflation and bring down to a level that it was. You know we were at zero, but actually the best number is 1 percent, you know that. You don’t want it really zero. But we were at zero. We got to exactly 1 percent, the perfect number, one thing every economist agrees, don’t have it at zero, have it at, like, 1 percent. They even say 1 to 2. But I said, “Listen, do 1.” We had it at 1 percent and we had it there for a long period of time. And we had the value of the dollar, we had it so that this country could make a lot of money. And I fought other countries where they devalued their dollar, they devalued their currency. Whether it was the pound, whether it was the yuan or the yen. And I used to fight like cats and dogs with the leaders of other countries because they were stealing from us when they did that, they had artificial devaluations of their currency. It's a very important thing. I haven’t even heard it mentioned in two years. It’s a very important thing. It's very hard for us to compete when they do that artificially. They had to pay a big price when they did it. They never really did it for very long. I said we’re not going to do business with you any more as a country. They believed me. They let it go back up.

Instead of putting America last, as the Biden administration has done very, very openly and bravely, because I can’t imagine saying, “Let's put America last” — I think it takes courage – we will again put America first. Every policy.

Thank you very much. We do love our country. That's why we are here. I didn’t need this. I had a very nice, easy life. This is something I didn’t need. A lot of you people don’t need either. But we love our country, we have to take care of our country, we have to save our country.

Every policy must be geared toward that which supports the American worker, the American family and businesses, both large and small, and allows our country to compete with other nations on a very level playing field, which we never had until I came along and the Trump administration came along. And now we are losing it. They are moving back into China, they are moving back into other countries. It's horrible. That means low taxes, low regulations and fair trade. Much of which I’ve already completed, but now will even greatly enhance.

Other countries should pay for the privilege of coming into the American marketplace. They have to pay to come into our country and make all of that money, take it away from us. Thanks to the Trump administration, still the best and biggest country in the world is what we have. We have the best and biggest. If you remember, for many years, you can look in your projection books, China was going to take over from us as the largest economy in the world in 2018 or 2019. I said I don’t like that timing.

I was with President Xi, who is now president for life. I call him king. He said “No, no, I am not the king.” I said, “Yes, you are the king, you’re president for life, that's the same thing.”

But I said, “President, President, you can’t do these things.” Remember they had China 25? That means China was going to take over virtually the whole world economy by ‘25. I said that’s not a nice sign, I don’t want that sign. They took it down, they took down the whole slogan. It will probably be coming back in the near future. But I found it very insulting. I said, “I find that very insulting.”

On Day 1, we will end Joe Biden’s war on American energy. You will see when that happens, you will see energy costs come down. Because energy is so big and important, you will see inflation dropping, dropping, dropping. You will see it come down. It’s a thing of beauty. You wouldn’t think it’s that complicated. What has been complicated a little bit is what has happened with so many other things, I believe originally started by this energy disaster. We were $1.87 for gasoline, now it is hitting $5, $6, $7 and even $8 and it’s going to go really bad. The socialist disaster known as the Green New Deal, which is destroying our country, and the many crippling regulations that it has spawned, will be immediately terminated so our country can again breathe and grow and thrive like it should.

It’s very very much hurting our country. Germany tried it.You know, Germany tried it. They were up for about a year. Remember, I said to Angela, do you remember Angela? Do you remember Angela? Nobody is remembering her now. Angela Merkel. I sent her a white flag of surrender. She said, “But why do you send this to me, Donald?” I said, “Angela, I sent it to you because this is a flag of surrender, you're getting 78 percent of your energy from Russia.” When that happens, history has proven that it’s not good for Germany. Just take a look over the last 150 years, it hasn’t been good.

What I didn’t know is it would take place so fast. Germany closed, as you know, all of its coal plants, all of its nuclear power plants, they closed everything. Now they’re building coal plants and they’re building them fast. China's building a coal plant every week. Every week, they open up another. They talk about all of the things that they do environmentally. They are watching us die with the Green New Deal, with our windmills and solar that doesn’t have the power to fire up our great factories and great plants. They are watching us die and they are laughing as it happens. Remember, economic security is national security. That’s what it is. We need economic security.

That is why we will launch an all-out campaign to eliminate America’s dependence on China. We will bring our supply chains, which are a disaster right now, you can't get anything, and good luck getting a turkey for Thanksgiving. No. 1, won't get it, and if you do, you will pay three to four times more than you paid last year. We will bring our supply chains and manufacturing base back home, as we were strongly doing during the Trump administration. We will systematically bring back health, wealth and success to the American middle class and to America itself.

Please, sit down.

I feel so guilty having you stand. You’ve been standing for the whole event. I feel very guilty. I don't want that to happen.

To every worker and family struggling to survive in the Biden economy with inflation destroying your family and your life, this campaign will be for you. Help is on the way. Joe Biden has abolished America's borders. We are going to restore and secure America's borders just like we had them before. Best ever. We built the wall and now we will add to it. Now we built the wall, we completed the wall and then we said, “Let's do more,” and we did a lot more. And as we were doing it, we had an election that came up. And when they came in, they had three more weeks to complete the additions to the wall, which would have been great. And they said, no, no, we are not going to do that. That is when I realized that they actually want to have this disaster known as open borders. Hard to believe, isn’t it.

But one of the reasons we had so much success at the border was because of the fact that — two things. We got Mexico to give us free of charge 28,000 soldiers. That helps. The president of Mexico is a great gentleman by the way, a socialist but that is OK. You can't have everything. But he is a great man and a great friend of mine. Twenty-eight thousand soldiers while we were building the wall. And then when the wall was finished, that’s how we set all these records, we have records that no one can even compete with right now. It's a disaster. I believe it's 10 million people coming in, not three or four million people, they’re pouring into our country. We have no idea who they are and where they come from. We have no idea what’s happening to our country. We are being poisoned. Within moments of my inauguration, catch and release will be gone forever. Remain in Mexico —

— Remain in Mexico, which was so important. Everybody came in here and they remained here and never left. If you couldn't get them, you couldn't find them. I had a policy, remain in Mexico. And if you think it was easy for me to get the president of Mexico to agree to that, it wasn't but we got it. And they terminated it. Now they come here and stay and we have no idea where they are, and they get lost. It's very dangerous for our country. And again, I’ll say: We are going to pay a big price someday for what they are doing. We will begin the process of safely removing the illegal alien criminals that have been unlawfully allowed into our country. We have no choice. We have no choice.

And in restoring border security, we will stop the flow of deadly drugs and horrible human trafficking, which both have been set upon us like never before. The human trafficking, you think of it as an ancient thing. It’s not ancient, because of the internet, human trafficking is worse than it’s ever been in history. We stop them at the southern border, which is the No. 1 port all over the world, the southern border. So much comes through the southern border. No. 1 port and we stopped them. Now, it's at levels that are many, many times what it was just two years ago. Biden and the radical left have let loose on this total breakdown of law and order. It was a total breakdown of law and order. I will restore public safety and American cities and other communities that need our help. If they don't want our help, we’re going to insist that they take our help this time. Because you know, the Democrat governors, these are all Democrat cities, the governors and mayors are supposed to ask for the help, they would never ask for help. And yet people are being shot and killed at random, like nobody has ever seen before. And we sent in the National Guard in Minneapolis and other places. In Seattle, we went and we were getting ready to go and they took over part of the city. The governors, the Democrats don’t want to ever ask to do anything because they don’t want to shake things up. In the meantime, the cities are rotting. They are indeed cesspools of blood. So we’re going to go help them, even though they don't want our help. We will give our police back their authority, resources, power, legal protection, and we will give them back their respect. They’re great people. I will immediately launch a no-holds barred national campaign to dismantle the gangs and clean out the nests of organized street crime.

The worst criminals, the worst gangs are MS-13, under the Barack Hussein Obama administration, they were unable to take them out because the countries where they came from wouldn’t take them. And I learned about that. My first day, I should say. And I learned about it and I said, “Which countries?” And it was Honduras, Guatemala, it was El Salvador, some others. And I said, “How much do we pay them?” “Sir, you pay them $750 million a year. That’s a lot of money.” I said, all right, stop payment. We're not paying them anymore. Because they wouldn't accept them. They would put planes on the runway so when our plane would come out with these gang members from MS-13, the plane couldn’t land because other planes were on the runway. The buses weren’t allowed to get through their borders because they had stronger borders than we did by far. We don't have borders, they did. Other countries that we defend have borders. We defend other countries' borders but we don’t defend our own. These countries — I got to know all of the presidents, prime ministers. I got to know them all. I said, all right, stop payment of the $750 million a year. They would not take them. You cannot get anybody back in. They didn't just come out, they sent them out. They want to keep their good ones. They don't want the bad ones. These are gang members that will kill, and they like using knives because a knife is more painful than a gun. You’ve read the stories. MS-13, these are savages. They say, “Please do not use that name, they are people.” I say, “No, they are savages.” And so we went along and I said stop payment of the $750 million and I get a call the next morning from the presidents of every country that we are talking about.

“Sir, there seems to be a misunderstanding, what is the problem? Is there anything we can do?”

“Yeah, you're not taking your MS-13 gang members back that you sent to us in the caravans.”

I love the name, I came up with it. I love the name, the caravans, thousands and thousands of people. And in those caravans you have rough, rough people. I said, “You are not taking them back.”

“Well, we didn't know this was a problem, sir. Is there anything we could do?”

I said, “Yeah, take them back.”

“We would be glad to take them back.”

They took ’em back. I still didn't give them the 750. By the way, now Biden wants to give them $4 billion. They were happy with 750 and now they want to give them $4 billion. Somebody, someday is going to explain that one to me. It actually makes you rage with anger when you hear that. They wanted 750 so badly and now they're getting $4 billion. We will wage war upon the cartels and stop the fentanyl and deadly drugs from killing 200,000 Americans per year.

And I will ask Congress for legislation ensuring that drug dealers and human traffickers, these are terrible, terrible, horrible, people who are responsible for death, carnage and crime all over our country. Every drug dealer during his or her life on average will kill 500 people with the drugs they sell, not to mention the destruction of families. But we’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts. Because it’s the only way. We don’t need any more blue-ribbon committees. I don’t like to say this. I don’t even know if the American public is ready for it. A lot of my people say, please don't say that, sir. That’s not nice.

They kill 500 people each on average. If you don't do this, in China, when I was with President Xi, I said, “President, do you have a drug problem?” No, no, no, we don't. He looked at me like I didn't know what I was doing. He said, “No we don't have a drug” — how come you don't have a drug problem?

He said quick trial. “What is a quick trial?” I sort of knew. “What is a quick trial?” That’s where if you get caught dealing drugs, you have an immediate and quick trial. And by the end of the day, you're executed. That’s a terrible thing but they have no drug problem.

The only drug problem they have is they make the fentanyl that comes into our country, and I had him stopping it. Then, when I was gone, no one mentioned it to him again. We were stopping it. That was way down, that number, but they send it in. But they don't have a drug problem. Other countries like Singapore – has no drug problem, no drug — you ask them, they don't even know what you're talking about, when you say drug problem, they don't even know what you’re talking about, they have no drug problem.

Why should they sell there and risk their lives every time they sell, when they can come to the United States and nobody even cares. They can do whatever they want to do and become rich. It's a disgrace. If you want to get rid of that and also bring down your level of crime probably 75, 80 percent, that is the only answer. No more blue-ribbon — I refuse to create them anymore, it was just a joke, it was New York people wanting to be on a committee for publicity reasons, no more blue-ribbon committees. That’s the only way you’re going to solve the problem. I hope politicians are listening because they should do it quickly. Joe Biden has also proven he is committed to indoctrinating our children, even using the Department of Justice against parents who object. It's a terrible thing. It's so sad what’s happening. When I am in the White House, our schools will cease pushing critical race theory as they were.

Radical civics and gender insanity, or if they do that, they will lose all federal funding. But we’ll get them to stop. I will be the president who finally fixes education in America. We were doing great. We were starting to really get it right. We will not let men, as an example, participate in women's sports. Is that OK? No men. No men.

My people tell me, “Sir, that’s politically incorrect to say.” I said, “That's OK. I’ll say it anyway if you don't mind.” We’ve had tremendous, tremendous problems and you know, it is very unfair to women, just very, very unfair. We will defend the rights of parents and we will defend the family as the center of American life.

But who would think, standing up here, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that a politician, and I don't like to think of myself as a politician, but I guess that’s what I am. I hate that thought. But that a politician would be up saying, We will defend parental rights. Of course we would defend — who would think we would even have to mention this? Who would think it should even be a subject to be talked about? We have to defend parental rights, can you believe this? As commander in chief, I will get Biden’s radical left ideology out of our military. And I did, I did.

And the first day, they put it back. The first day, they signed an executive order and they put it back. It was gone. We will abolish every Biden Covid mandate and rehire every patriot who was fired from our military, with an apology and full back pay.

Thank you. And they deserve an apology. And they deserve full back pay and they’ll get it. And unlike Biden possibly getting us into World War III, which can seriously happen, I will keep America out of foolish and unnecessary foreign wars, just as I did for four straight years.

We will again have peace through strength. That is all it is. As events overseas have shown, to protect our people from the unthinkable threat of nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles, the United States must also build a state-of-the-art, next-generation missile defense shield. We need it. The power of these missiles and the power of a word I refuse to say: nuclear. We have to have it. We need a defense shield. We have to do it. We actually have the technology and we’re going to build it. Just as I rebuilt our military, I will get this done.

I rebuilt our entire military, which nobody talks about. When I got there, we had jet fighters that were 48 years old. We had bombers that were 60 years old. We had bombers where their grandfathers flew them when they were new. And now the grandchild is flying the bomber, but not anymore. But as I've said before, the gravest threats to our civilization are not from abroad but from within. None is greater than the weaponization of the justice system, the F.B.I. and the D.O.J. We must conduct a top to bottom overhaul to clean out the festering rot and corruption of Washington, D.C.

Thank you. And I’m a victim, I will tell you. I’m a victim. Think of it. The F.B.I. offered $1 million to Christopher Steele, who wrote the fake dossier, if he will lie and say that the fake dossier was true. And he refused to do it, so it had to be really fake. And then they hired somebody, Danchenko, for $200,000 a year, to focus on Trump and to get Trump and other things, including the raid of a very beautiful house that sits right here. The raid of Mar-a-Lago, think of it. And I say, “Why didn’t you raid Bush’s place, why didn’t you raid Clinton? 32,000 emails. Why didn’t you raid Clinton’s place? Why didn’t you do Obama, who took a lot of things with him?”

We will dismantle the deep state and restore government by the people. To further drain the swamp, I will push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress, it’s time. And I will ask for a permanent ban on taxpayer funding of campaigns. A lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and cabinet members.

No, I see what they make, they leave the White House or they leave Congress and they’re paid millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. No, you have to have a ban. We want a ban on members of Congress getting rich by trading stocks with insider information. And many of our great members agree with that. They actually agree with that, and of course, we will do whatever it takes to bring back honesty, confidence and trust in our elections.

To eliminate cheating, I will immediately demand voter ID, same-day voting and only paper ballots. Only paper ballots.

France just had an election — 36 million people voted. It was all done by 10 o’clock in the evening, no complaints. You had a winner, you had a loser, the loser went home. The winner, he’s a friend of mine, nice guy, but he was happy. But there was no complaints. And if there was a complaint, you check it out and you can fix it very easily, you can find out what’s going on. No, paper ballots, same-day voting, voter ID, so simple. And we want all votes counted by election night.

They spent all of the money for machines and all of the stuff and they end up two weeks later, three weeks later, by that time, everyone forgot there was even an election. It’s horrible. This doesn’t happen, I’ve said it before, it doesn't happen in third-world countries, they do better than we do. It's horrible what’s happening with our election and our election process. And I’ll get that job done. That’s a personal job for me. I take that very personally. But this is just the beginning of our national greatness agenda. And that’s what we call it: a national greatness agenda.

Because our country can be greater than it ever was. Our country was great. Our country is not great anymore. Our country is a laughingstock right now, but our country can be greater than it ever was before, by a lot. There will be more, much more, to come in the months ahead. There are so many things we can do, many of them are not even hard to implement. The journey ahead of us will not be easy. Anyone who truly seeks to take on this rigged and corrupt system will be faced with a storm of fire that only a few could understand. Right?

I happen to have some children in the front row. They understand. In fact, my one boy, stand up, Eric.

I think he got more subpoenas than any man in the history of our country. So, unfair. Al Capone, you all heard of the great gangster? Al Capone got far less. Billy the Kid almost got none. Jesse James, no. Eric Trump got more subpoenas. He is a Ph.D. in subpoenas. They come from Congress.

I appreciate the job you do and the abuse you’ve taken. I really do.

It hasn't been a joyride for our great first lady either. It hasn't been a joyride. Stand up.

I go home and she says — they do love her. I go home and she says, “You look angry and upset,” and I say, “Just leave me alone.” It hasn't been the easiest thing, but she’s been a great first lady and people love her.

We will be resisted by the combined forces of the establishment, the media, the special interests, the globalists, the marxist radicals, the woke corporations, the weaponized power of the government, the colossal political machines, the tidal wave of dark money and the most dangerous domestic censorship system ever created by man or woman, the most dangerous system we’ve ever had. We will be attacked. We will be slandered. We will be persecuted, just as I have been, I mean I have been. But many people in this room have been. But we will not be intimidated. We will persevere, we will stand tall in the storm, we will march forward into the torrent. And we in the end will win. Our country will win. We will win.

My fellow Americans, we will join together and reverse this staggering American decline and it is staggering indeed and we will again restore the spirit of our nation. And then, we must build and raise up a legacy that will stand without equal in the entire history of the world. With your help, we will create communities where our children will grow up safe and strong. And a nation where they will grow up free and prosperous and well. We will re-establish the principles of hard work and merit and end the scourge of homelessness that is plaguing our beleaguered Democrat-run cities. We will heal our divisions and bring our people back together through incredible success. We will defend life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We will expand the frontiers of human knowledge and extend the horizons of human achievement and we will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on the surface of Mars, which I got started. But we need everyone involved. We need everyone’s help. We need to look out for one another. We need to be friends. And we need every patriot on board.

Because this is not just a campaign. This is a quest to save our country. I am talking about saving our country.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I am asking for your vote, I am asking for your support, and I am asking for your friendship and your prayers on this very incredible but dangerous journey.

If our movement remains united and confident, then we will shatter the forces of tyranny and we will unleash the glories of liberty for ourselves and for our children and for generations yet to come. America's golden age is just ahead. And together, we will make America powerful again.

We will make America wealthy again. 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.

Thank you very much. God bless you, all.

By Lazaro Gamio / The New York Times

Former President Donald J. Trump announced his third bid for the presidency on Tuesday night in a speech that was like many others that have come before it: packed full of falsehoods.

Mr. Trump uttered the first inaccurate claim about two minutes in: that his administration “built the greatest economy in the history of the world.” That was inaccurate even for recent American history. Annual average growth, even before the coronavirus pandemic decimated the economy, was lower under Mr. Trump than under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

Two minutes later, he ticked off at least four hyperbolic statements about his accomplishments as president.

Stephanie Lai

The victory on Wednesday of Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat, in his re-election race in Maine completed a shutout of Republicans from New England’s congressional ranks this year, signaling the failure of an expensive effort by the G.O.P. to flip House seats in a region that has increasingly slipped out of its reach.

The G.O.P., grasping for a large majority in an election cycle that appeared to heavily favor them, had placed big bets on picking up seats in even the bluest of places, including Connecticut, Maine and Rhode Island, a state that has not had Republican representation in the House for nearly 30 years.

The party backed centrist candidates who pledged to reach across the political aisle, working to appeal to the region’s bountiful independent and moderate-leaning electorate. They included Allan Fung, a former mayor who sought an open seat in Rhode Island; George Logan, a former state senator who challenged Representative Jahana Hayes in Connecticut; and Bruce Poliquin, who mounted a rematch against Mr. Golden, who had toppled him in 2018 to win the Maine seat.

The strategy came close to paying off for Republicans, who suffered narrow defeats in all three races, part of a wave of disappointments across the country that dashed their predictions of a red wave and left them with a razor-thin margin of control.

In the days before the election, polls had showed Mr. Fung leading Democrat Seth Magaziner in a district in southern and central Rhode Island that President Joe Biden carried in the 2020 elections. Mr. Magaziner won by 3 percentage points, according to The Associated Press.

In western Connecticut, polls had also showed Ms. Hayes, a second-term incumbent, in a tight contest with Mr. Logan, and she ended up prevailing by less than a percentage point, according to The A.P.

And in Maine, where Mr. Polquin had closely trailed Mr. Golden for much of the campaign, Mr. Golden ultimately won by 6 percentage points, in the ranked-choice voting count, according to The A.P.

The Republican losses meant that Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who was not up for election this year, would remain the sole New England Republican in Congress.

Shane Goldmacher

Republicans secured a slender majority in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, a delayed yet consequential finish to the 2022 midterm elections that will reorder the balance of power in Washington and is expected to effectively give the party a veto on President Biden’s agenda for the next two years.

After more than a week of vote counting, the Republican Party formally captured the 218 House seats needed to claim the majority after just four years out of power. The outcomes in six close races that remain undecided will determine the final size of a slim Republican majority that will be far narrower than party leaders had expected, though Republicans still cheered the achievement.

“The era of one-party Democrat rule in Washington is over,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, said this week on Capitol Hill, as his Republican colleagues nominated him to serve as House speaker. “Washington now has a check and balance.”

The victory of Representative Mike Garcia of California pushed Republicans into the majority, a somewhat anticlimactic finish to an election that was an overall disappointment for House Republicans who had arrived at Election Day with grandiose predictions of a red wave. Of the six remaining uncalled House races, Republicans were ahead in four and Democrats were leading in two.

In the Senate, Democrats maintained control of the chamber, which has been split 50-50, and could even expand their majority if Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, prevails in a runoff election next month against Herschel Walker, the Republican former football star.

The final results show that voters failed to deliver the type of unalloyed repudiation of Mr. Biden and his management of the economy that many Republicans had predicted in the face of the hottest inflation in 40 years. Democrats instead enjoyed the strongest showing in a presidential midterm in the last two decades, after Mr. Biden repeatedly cast the 2022 campaign not as a referendum on Democratic rule but as a choice between his party and Republican extremism.

“I congratulate Leader McCarthy on Republicans winning the House majority, and am ready to work with House Republicans to deliver results for working families,” Mr. Biden said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that “the future is too promising to be trapped in political warfare.”

But the president also recognized the surprising strength of the Democratic showing, and the defeat of a series of far-right Republicans who had refused to recognize the legitimacy of the last election. “There was a strong rejection of election deniers, political violence and intimidation,” he said.

In the House, Democratic incumbents last week displayed an uncanny durability from Michigan to Virginia to Kansas to Pennsylvania. If not for a series of court cases that affected new district lines in states like Florida, New York and Ohio, Republicans might not have won a majority at all. The Democratic Party’s struggles in New York, where Republican gains included knocking off the chairman of the House Democratic campaign committee, also bolstered the Republican takeover.

Still, there is a saying in Congress that the only number that matters in the House is 218 — and Republicans will enter 2023 with at least that many votes, ushering in a new era of divided government.

“Voters hate division and dysfunction, and they just voted for two more years of it,” said Chris Kofinis, a Democratic political strategist and former chief of staff to Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia.

Democrats have ceded the House after just four years in charge. The party, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, won power in the first midterm under former President Donald J. Trump and gave it back in Mr. Biden’s first midterm. It was the exact same length of time — four years — that Democrats last held the chamber, between the 2006 and 2010 elections, and a sign of the continued volatility of American politics.

Republicans had needed to flip only five seats in 2022 in order to claim the majority in the chamber, and they were competing in dozens of Democratic districts in the weeks leading up to the election. A super PAC aligned with the House Republican leadership had out-raised its Democratic counterpart by nearly $90 million, giving the party a financial edge.

Yet the new Republican majority was not cemented until more than a week after the election.

“Did we want something much bigger?” Mr. McCarthy said on Tuesday. “Yeah, we did.”

Among Republicans, finger-pointing over the party’s shortcomings, in both the House and Senate, had already begun in earnest. Some blamed the party’s messaging. Others took aim at the large role that Mr. Trump has continued to play in the party after Republicans lost the House, Senate and White House during his first term. Undaunted, Mr. Trump announced another run for president on Tuesday at his private club in Florida.

On Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party’s longtime leader, easily dispatched a challenge from Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who had served as chairman of the Senate G.O.P. campaign arm for the party’s disappointing 2022 contests. The two men’s bitter feud has spilled into public view and has served as a distraction during the high-stakes Georgia runoff. Also on Wednesday, the Senate took, on a bipartisan vote, a key step toward passing legislation to provide federal protections for same-sex marriages, with a dozen Republicans joining Democrats in support of the measure.

The political dynamics in Washington in 2023 will be very different with Republicans leading the House. The slenderness of the new Republican majority has raised questions about both Mr. McCarthy’s ability to take the speaker’s gavel in January and his ability to govern, as a far-right faction is already making demands of him.

Mr. McCarthy, 57, resoundingly won a closed-door nomination vote to become the next speaker, dispatching the protest candidacy of Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, who was an influential figure in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results on behalf of Mr. Trump.

Mr. McCarthy won the secret-ballot vote 188 to 31. But that vote was the easy part.

To officially claim the speakership, he will require the nearly unanimous support of his conference in a formal floor vote in January. The narrow Republican majority means he can afford to lose an excruciatingly small number of dissenters, greatly empowering his internal critics.

Among them is Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a close Trump ally, who said on Tuesday that he would oppose Mr. McCarthy on the floor in January and that there was “a critical mass” of similar McCarthy opponents.

“To believe that Kevin McCarthy is going to be speaker, you have to believe he’s going to get votes in the next six weeks that he couldn’t get in the last six years,” Mr. Gaetz said.

The future for Ms. Pelosi, 82, is also uncertain. In October, her husband was the victim of a violent attack inside their San Francisco home, where he was hit with a hammer and hospitalized; he has since been discharged from the hospital.

In an interview over the weekend on ABC News, Ms. Pelosi said, “I don’t have any plans to step away from Congress.” She makes little effort to mask her disdain for her potential successor, Mr. McCarthy, and his ability to serve as House speaker, a powerful post that is second in the presidential line of succession.

“No, I don’t think he has it,” Ms. Pelosi said on CNN over the weekend, when asked if Mr. McCarthy had what it takes to be speaker. “But that’s up to his own people to make a decision as to how they want to be led or otherwise.”

Democratic control of the Senate ensures that whatever agenda Mr. McCarthy and the Republicans push through is likely to be dead on arrival in the upper chamber. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, has called his chamber the “firewall” against Republican priorities.

With a Senate under Democratic control, Mr. Biden will continue to be able to have his cabinet and judicial appointments confirmed, including any potential Supreme Court vacancies. In the House, Republicans will now have broad subpoena power to initiate investigations into the Biden administration, and Mr. McCarthy has signaled that they are eager to do so.

The White House began making plans months ago for an onslaught of Republican investigations, hiring Richard A. Sauber, a white-collar defense lawyer, as “special counsel to the president” to oversee the response to subpoenas and other oversight efforts.

The relationship between Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy as their parties’ most powerful leaders in Washington got off to an inauspicious start.

Mr. Biden told reporters that he called Mr. McCarthy right after the election and said, “If you win the majority, congratulations. But congratulations — so far, you’ve made some gains.” Mr. McCarthy characterized it differently on Fox News: “He congratulated me, so for anyone who thinks we didn’t win the majority, Joe at least believes we did as well.”

Maggie Haberman, Shane Goldmacher and Michael C. Bender

There is no one working for him with the title of campaign manager. The mechanics of how to access reams of vital data that he amassed about his supporters over eight years were being hammered out until the last minute before his Tuesday night campaign introduction. A key planner of the announcement event has a day job as the C.E.O. of a social-media company.

Though former President Donald J. Trump has talked of a third run for the White House since before he completed his term, the rollout of his actual candidacy — as the Republican Party grapples with the fallout from midterm losses — has been surprisingly slapdash. Despite hosting about 500 people at his Mar-a-Lago home for his kickoff, the campaign did not take the opportunity to also hold a fund-raiser with them.

And, behind the scenes, aides have been wrestling with Mr. Trump’s impulse for airing grievances, particularly over the 2020 election, in hopes of keeping him focused on the future.

Advisers say that Mr. Trump is determined to recapture the feel of his 2016 campaign, when he ran as an insurgent against the political establishment and relied on a small core group of aides. But he does not fit the profile of an outsider: He is a former president and the leader of his party. His 2016 campaign, while ultimately successful, was riven by infighting for months. And while the small group of aides and advisers involved in Mr. Trump’s nascent campaign reflects a desire to stay lean, it also reflects how many former aides Mr. Trump has come to disdain — and, in some cases, vice versa.

“It’s always a little bit chaotic,” said Bryan Lanza, who worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Yet, he added, “I tend to believe that’s the way the president wants it, so why go against the grain?”

The open and overlapping investigations into Mr. Trump have also chilled the desire of many political operatives to associate too closely with the former president, lest they face possible legal jeopardy themselves, a number of his former aides said — even though Mr. Trump pressed for an early announcement in part out of the belief that it could provide something of a shield against indictment.

Mr. Trump’s communications adviser Boris Epshteyn, who has established himself as an in-house counsel on some of the investigations Mr. Trump is facing, is likely to take a role as a senior adviser in the campaign, according to three people briefed on the matter.

At the same time, some former aides who attended the Mar-a-Lago announcement expressed interest in helping the new campaign but said they had not been asked. Major roles that have not been announced as filled include political director, communications director, lead pollster and data chief.

In his two previous campaigns, Mr. Trump went through a string of campaign managers. A decision was made not to have a formal campaign manager this time. Instead, two veteran political strategists will effectively split the duties of one: Susie Wiles, who has functioned as Mr. Trump’s top political adviser for two years, and Chris LaCivita, a former political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and adviser to numerous candidates, who has resigned as a partner at FP1 Strategies to join the Trump campaign, two people briefed on the matter said.

Another veteran adviser, the pollster Tony Fabrizio, will work for the super PAC supporting Mr. Trump rather than directly advising him or his campaign.

Both Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita are seasoned operatives with an understanding of the political landscape and the mechanics of campaigns. But it remains to be seen how closely their advice will be heeded. Mr. Trump often turns to informal advisers for affirmation of his own ideas and impulses.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s a 100-person inner circle or whether it’s a five-person inner circle,” Mr. Lanza said. “He listens to everybody’s opinions, suggestions, recommendations — and then he does whatever the hell he wants. And by the way, he’s batting .500. That’s not bad. It gets you into the hall of fame.”

To be sure, Mr. Trump’s campaign start occurred unusually early for a presidential run, driven by both a belief that his being a candidate could shield him from criminal exposure — since he could denounce any prosecution as politically motivated — and the desire to blunt growing momentum behind Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Jason Miller, the chief executive of the conservative-oriented social-media firm Gettr, who helped arrange for Tuesday night’s announcement, dismissed questions about the incipient campaign team. “This week is about President Trump’s announcement, his message and his vision for our country,” Mr. Miller said. “The inside-baseball campaign details, which only the Washington insiders care about, can follow later.”

Among those making clear that they will not return for another White House run were Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner. Ms. Trump issued a statement saying she did not plan to be involved in politics: “While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena.”

Mr. Kushner, who, like his wife, was a senior adviser to Mr. Trump and oversaw the campaign from within the White House, attended the Mar-a-Lago announcement but has indicated he will not take part in the new campaign. As a family member by marriage, Mr. Kushner was one of a few people able to navigate Mr. Trump’s explosive management style without constant fear of reprisal, and he sometimes shielded other aides and expedited decision-making because he was seen as having Mr. Trump’s full proxy.

The week of Nov. 14 had long been the Trump team’s target date for an announcement. But nearly all of his advisers suggested he scrap the plan when Republicans fared far more poorly in the midterm elections than they had expected. Mr. Miller, the Gettr executive, was among those who publicly urged Mr. Trump to delay it until after the Dec. 6 runoff for Senate in Georgia.

Tuesday turned out to be the same night that House Republicans gathered in Washington to select their leadership team, meaning some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal allies in elected office could not attend.

Mr. Trump is also believed to have invited each of the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, but few came. Two committee members, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they received repeated calls from Trump aides pressuring them to attend, but declined, to avoid being seen as having taken sides already as the Republican primary field begins to take shape.

It is unclear whether any of the major donors who backed him previously will return. Already, the hedge fund executives Stephen A. Schwarzman and Ken Griffin have said they will not support Mr. Trump in 2024. And other donors have privately complained that they had yet to receive any outreach from Mr. Trump’s team.

Mr. Trump has had an expansive small-dollar fund-raising operation, and that is expected to make up the bulk of his campaign money. But while Mr. Trump had banked $100 million ahead of his announcement across multiple political accounts, none of those funds are permitted to be used to finance his candidacy directly. So his aides raced to come up with workarounds.

The biggest account, Save America PAC, had nearly $70 million, a chunk of which is said to have been transferred to an aligned super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., that is being overseen by Mr. Trump’s former spokesman Taylor Budowich.

But the Save America PAC technically owns Mr. Trump’s vaunted database of supporter names, phone numbers and email addresses. To legally access that data, the campaign is raising money through another committee that is expected to share its proceeds with both the campaign and the Save America PAC.

Under federal law, Mr. Trump cannot use his new presidential campaign committee for his personal benefit. But restrictions are less clear for the Save America PAC, which paid more than $10 million in legal fees in 2021 and 2022, including some to Mr. Trump’s defense team related to the F.B.I.’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate.

The choice of venues for Mr. Trump’s kickoff, meanwhile, ensured that his private company would profit from the event — a form of self-dealing he has engaged in for more than seven years.

“I don’t like to think of myself as a politician, but I guess that’s what I am,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday evening. “I hate that thought.”