STORY: A day after former U.S. president Donald Trump announced plans to seek reelection in 2024, launching an early bid to become the Republican nominee in an effort to pre-empt potential rivals, one of the most prominent donors in the Republican Party said he would no longer support trump.
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who had been one of Wall Street's biggest supporters to Donald Trump's election campaigns, said that it was time for new party leadership, and plans to back a different Republican candidate for the White House.
Trump made his announcement a week after U.S. congressional elections in which his party under-performed expectations. Several Trump-backed candidates lost midterm House and Senate races and those who echoed his false claims about the 2020 election were defeated in key contests.
Still, the businessman-turned-politician remains the top choice of Republican voters for the 2024 race in recent opinion polls.
And Stanford professor and political scientist Francis Fukuyama says despite hand-wringing in the GOP, Trump will likely win the Republican nomination.
" I think he will be the nominee. It's going to be very difficult, given the passion with which his base reveres him, for anybody else to run. But I think the Republican Party is really in a lot of trouble either way because I think it's actually going to be hard for him to win the presidency if he is the nominee."
Another potential headwind for Trump this time around-- a new media landscape.
Media mogul and former Trump loyalist Rupert Murdoch has reportedly warned Trump his media empire will not back his attempt to return to the White House.
And the New York Post - also controlled by Murdoch-- covered Trump's 2024 bid with the headline buried on the front page that was more a slight: 'Florida man makes announcement.' And it's not just Murdoch-owned news outlets.
Fukuyama says a change in the way the media covers Trump could shake up the former president's playbook.
"The media is probably going to cover him a different way. You can already see that just in the days since the election, In 2016, everybody was bending over backwards to be even-handed and to give him the benefit of the doubt when he said something crazy. I don't think they're going to do that anymore."
Meanwhile, in another potential sign of his waning influence, on Wednesday, top U.S. Senate Republican Mitch McConnell - whom Trump has publicly criticized - held off the first challenge in his nearly 16-year reign as party chief, despite Trump's repeated calls for McConnell's ouster.
