FBI Raid Has Solidified Trump’s Clout in GOP Ahead of Expected 2024 Run, Conservative Observers Say

News Analysis

The recent raid by the FBI on former President Donald Trump’s residence has solidified Trump’s hold on the 2024 GOP presential nomination, according to conservatives and analysts.

The raid of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, was aimed at preventing the former president from gaining office again, they told The Epoch Times.

If anything, however, the raid has had the opposite effect, they said, as the belief grows that Trump will announce a new presidential run sooner rather than later.

Far from providing a smoking gun that opponents of Trump may have sought to bar the former president from office, the raid has demonstrated that Trump can never be reconciled to partisan special interests in Washington that have a lock on government, thus ensuring that Trump most certainly will run, said some.

In the end, either Trump or the “deep state”—a group of powerful bureaucrats who Trump and others say really control the shots in Washington—will prevail: That’s the message conservatives should take from the raid, said two people interviewed who are the most familiar with Trump’s thinking, Ken Blackwell and Sebastian Gorka, although neither men claimed to represent the views of the former president.

Local law enforcement officers in front of the home of former U.S. President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images) Raid Has Made Trump More Powerful

“Without doubt, President Trump is more powerful now after the illegal Mar-a-Lago raid than he has ever been politically,” former deputy presidential assistant under Trump, Sebastian Gorka, who is one of the former president’s fiercest allies, told the Epoch Times.

Gorka, 51, who hosts a syndicated radio show distributed by the Salem Network, estimated that Trump’s base of voters has grown from 75 million voters to

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