His rambling, low-energy speech at CPAC may have been billed as his comeback, but Donald Trump’s return to the political arena was even less enthusiastically endorsed by the attendees of the far-right conservative circus, the New York Times reports.

While Trump won the annual CPAC straw poll of potential presidential candidates, he garnered just 55% of the vote, hardly an overwhelming endorsement of his political viability a little more than a month after being removed from office.  More tellingly, only two-third (68%) of the people polled said they wanted Trump to run again in 2024.

Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, where the conference was held, received the next largest percentage, with 21%. 

Given that the poll was done without voter ID rules or repeated recounts, Trump will likely say that he won it bigly.  In one case, it’s a victory for Trump:  it’s the first vote in which he’s received the majority of votes.

But in the big picture, it’s a sharp disappointment for Trump’s 2024 chances.  Just four months after he lost the November election, and 39 days after he left the White House, Trump expected his re-emergence at CPAC to be his political resurrection.  Instead, with a speech largely panned as low-energy and a rehash of previously debunked claims, it will likely be his political eulogy.

While he claimed he sought unity among Republicans, claiming he wasn’t going to form a splinter party, Trump specifically called out as disloyal about two dozen members of the GOP–from Senators, to House members, to governors to state officials–whom he deemed insufficiently loyal to him.  It was a political hit list, which could turn into a target list for some of Trump’s most fervent disciples.

With tens of millions of dollars raised for a leadership PAC, Trump could become an influencer in the 2022 midterm elections, but it’s yet to be seen if that’s a benefit to the GOP.  Trump could endorse far-right candidates–those who praise him–in purple or light red districts, pushing them to more moderate Democrats or, worse yet for Republicans, forcing a three-way race between Democrats, Republicans and Trumplicans.