Former President Donald Trump is making a run for the White House again, he announced on Tuesday night in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. 

“In order to make America great again I am announcing my candidacy,” Trump said. 

The announcement comes just a week after midterm elections, and less than two weeks after an appearance in Sioux City, Iowa, where Trump endorsed Republicans Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Sen. Chuck Grassley, who both won their reelection races. 

Trump previously teased a 2024 presidential run during his Iowa speech saying, “I will probably do it again.” 

In both 2016 and 2020, Trump won the state. Iowa delivered Trump 51.1 percent of the vote in the 2016 race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, and in 2020 he won 53.1 percent against President Joe Biden. 

Timeline by Liam Halawith/The Daily Iowan

In his reelection announcement, Trump critiqued the Biden administration on America’s lack of energy independence, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and other foreign policy positions, as well as echoing familiar anti-immigration sentiments that defined his 2016 run. 

“We are here tonight to declare that it does not have to be this way,” Trump said. “Two years ago we were a great nation and soon we will be a great nation again.” 

Trump said the U.S. could not take another term under Biden.

“Our country could not take it, I say that not in laughter, I say that in tears,” he said.  

Though Trump was able to keep Iowa’s support in 2020, he lost his reelection bid nationally to Biden. Trump spread election lies claiming he won the race and that it was stolen from him, despite no evidence of widespread fraud. 

On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol, breaking into the building in a violent insurrection that left several dead. 

Iowa Democratic Party Chair Ross Wilburn said in a statement released Tuesday that Trump is a traitor to the nation and the oath he took when he was sworn into the presidency.

“A defeated former President who botched a pandemic response, continues to attack our democracy, and routinely makes bigoted statements isn’t fit to run for any office in our country,” Wilburn said. 

No other candidates have made announcements for the race that is two years away, though Republicans, including Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who could be potential nominees, visited Iowa — the first in the nation caucus state.