Former President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he would again seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

"America's comeback starts right now," Trump declared during a speech given from a ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago country club and home, adding, "Two years ago we were a great nation, and soon we will be a great nation again."

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

Trump enters the race as a Republican powerhouse and the likely frontrunner to win the GOP nomination for a third consecutive time. His latest campaign comes just two years after he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, leading his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to stage a violent insurrection at the Capitol to block the peaceful transfer of power.

On Tuesday, Trump suggested, with no evidence, that the Chinese government had intervened in the last election to keep him from being reelected and imposing tariffs on Chinese goods.

"Many people think that because of this, China played a very active role in the 2020 election — just saying, just saying," he claimed.

In his speech, Trump also suggested that America has slipped into crisis since his departure from the White House due to Biden’s abandonment of his policies that brought stability to the country.

"All they had to do," he said of the Biden administration, "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."

According to Washington Post writer, Marc A. Thiessen, over the past two fiscal years under Biden, nearly 1 million people have illegally snuck across the southern border and disappeared into the country. Plus, America is experiencing the worst labor shortage in U.S. history which is driving inflation.

As the first candidate to enter the 2024 presidential race, Trump is seizing the national spotlight after a week of harsh criticism from Republican politicians and pundits. They blame him for midterm election losses that cost the GOP both control of the U.S. Senate and significantly shrunk their anticipated margin of victory in the House of Representatives.

The poor performance of candidates endorsed by Trump led many Republicans to turn their focus toward Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who won his reelection bid on Nov. 8 by a 20-point margin.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ nearly 20-point victory in the 2022 midterms increased his sway with Republican legislators who have already shown a willingness to consider the governor for president. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Trump held his event Tuesday despite current and former advisers wanting him to delay it until after the Georgia runoff election for Senate between the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, and the Trump-backed Republican nominee, Herschel Walker. But if history has taught us anything about Trump, it is that he will not be controlled.

As the crowd arrived at Mar-a-Lago and mingled beneath a large "Make America Great Again" banner, they seemed excited despite Trump's latest campaign taking off in stormy weather. At present, Trump faces a string of criminal investigations. They include a civil lawsuit in New York over his company’s finances; another state-level probe in Georgia over his attempts to overturn his election loss there; and a federal probe of the top-secret documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago, his home in Florida, after leaving the White House in 2021.

A crowd gathered in the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s special announcement Tuesday night announcing another presidential bid | Getty

During Tuesday's speech, the former president didn't dwell on those potential legal challenges. Instead, he framed them as being politically motivated.

"I'm a victim, I will tell you, I'm a victim," he said of the Mar-a-Lago documents inquiry. It yet remains to be seen whether his conservative base can turn the self-proclaimed victim into a duly elected victor in the 2024 election.

It could be possible considering the conditions that met Trump on the runway in 2015, when pollsters and pundits predicted his imminent demise before his stunning 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton for president.

Since launching his first presidential run in 2015, the former reality TV star and New York real estate developer, now 76, has massively reshaped the Republican Party. Once dominated by free-market economic conservatives and national defense hawks who supported a powerful U.S. presence on the global stage, the GOP is now controlled by Trump-aligned populists pushing for an American withdrawal from the international stage in favor of domestic retrenchment.

In the eyes of his critics, Trump not only coarsened American politics but also sought to sidestep acceptable conventions of discourse in the political arena and to insist on demonstrably false claims.

More than any other president in the modern era, his tenure in office was marked by scandal and constant upheaval. He was impeached in 2019 and again in 2021.

Through it all, Trump has nevertheless retained the seemingly unshakable backing of a distinct plurality of voters on the right. For his staunchest supporters, impeachments and federal and state investigations are simply proof of Trump’s persistent claims that he has been unfairly targeted by a deep state of federal bureaucrats and law enforcement personnel.

Though currently overshadowed by controversy, Trump can take credit for delivering conservatives some of their most long-sought prizes, including nominating three of the Supreme Court justices who delivered, in June, on overturning Roe v. Wade and ending constitutional protection for access to abortion. He also pushed through a massive restructuring of the federal tax code.

The question on everyone’s mind is will he win again?