Former President Donald Trump will not have to disclose his personal finances for another several weeks.
Under federal law, presidential candidates are mandated to report information on their assets, income, and debt within 30 days of becoming a candidate. They can file for two 45-day extensions.
The FEC’s extension was granted after Trump made his first campaign appearance in several primary states, including in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
He is the first Republican to announce a 2024 White House bid.
“I’m more angry now, and I’m more committed now, than I ever was,” Trump told a small crowd at the New Hampshire Republican Party’s annual meeting in Salem, before heading to Columbia, South Carolina, for an appearance alongside his leadership team in the state.
In Columbia, Trump spoke to about 200 people in the state’s capitol building, with Gov. Henry McMaster and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) flanking him.
There is speculation that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely seen as the biggest threat to Trump, will launch his own 2024 bid. Top Republicans in both states that the former president visited—including New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley—are among those weighing bids of their own, although polls show that they are far behind Trump and DeSantis.
At both stops on Saturday, Trump echoed some of the themes that animated his 2016 campaign, including sharply criticizing illegal immigration and the Chinese Communist Party. In Columbia, the former president railed against the teaching of critical race theory, a Marxist-inspired set of theories that has sparked board protests across the United States.
“We’re going to stop the left-wing radical racists and perverts who are trying to indoctrinate our youth, and we’re going to get their Marxist hands off our children,” Trump said. “We’re going to defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders: men and women. We’re not going to allow men to play women’s sports.”
Some analysts say that his speeches over the weekend were a far cry from the rallies that he held across the United States in 2016 and 2020 to crowds of thousands of supporters. Trump told reporters in New Hampshire that “we’re going to do them soon.”
The trip to two early-primary states came more than two months after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign during a Nov. 15 speech at his Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump retains a significant base of support, particularly among the grassroots. While he loses in some head-to-head polls against DeSantis, he wins by significant margins when poll respondents are presented with a broader field of options.
Meanwhile, Trump again targeted DeSantis—who has not indicated whether he’s running for president—and claimed he changed his views on COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines.
“He promoted the vaccine as much as anybody in this country promoted it. You remember that he closed Florida. Florida was closed. There were Republican governors that did not close,” Trump told reporters several days ago.
In response, the Florida governor issued a response but did not directly address Trump’s claims.
“You take a crisis situation like COVID, the good thing about it is that when you’re an elected executive, you have to make all kinds of decisions, you’ve got to steer that ship,” DeSantis said Tuesday in response to a Trump-related question. “And the good thing is that people are able to render a judgment on that: Whether they re-elect you or not.”
“I’m happy to say in my case, not only did we win re-election, we won with the highest percentage of the vote that any Republican governor candidate has in the history of the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.
