WASHINGTON — Former president Donald Trump returned to Washington for the first time since leaving office Tuesday, vigorously repeating his false election claims that sparked the Jan. 6 insurrection at the nearby Capitol.

“It was a catastrophe that election. A disgrace to our country,” he said, insisting despite all evidence that he had won in 2020. “We may just have to do it again,” he said, repeating as he does in all recent appearances the ever-clearer hints that he will run again in 2024.

Trump’s appearance in the nation’s capital — his first trip back since Jan. 20, 2021, when President Biden was sworn into office despite Trump’s frantic efforts to remain in power — comes as allies have urged him to spend more time talking about his vision for the future and less relitigating the 2020 election as he prepares to announce an expected 2024 White House campaign.

Trump spoke hours after former vice president Mike Pence, a potential 2024 rival, outlined his own “Freedom Agenda” in a speech nearby.

While the former president remains consumed by the election he falsely claims was stolen from him a year and a half ago, Pence again implored conservatives to stop looking backward and focus on the future as he mulls his own.

“Some people may choose to focus on the past, but elections are about the future,” Pence said in an address to Young America’s Foundation, a student conservative group. “I believe conservatives must focus on the future to win back America. We can’t afford to take our eyes off the road in front of us because what’s at stake is the very survival of our way of life.”

The former White House partners were making dueling appearances again after campaigning for rival candidates in Arizona on Friday. Their separate speeches come amid news that Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, testified before a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol.

Trump spoke before an audience of hundreds gathered for the America First Policy Institute’s two-day America First Agenda Summit. Composed of former Trump administration officials and allies, the group is widely seen as an “administration in waiting” that could quickly move to the West Wing if Trump should run again and win.

The event had the feel of a Trump White House reunion — but one without Pence.

Pence, meanwhile, received a friendly — but not enthusiastic — welcome from the students, who struggled to break into a “USA!” chant.

In his remarks, he repeatedly touted the “Trump-Pence administration.’’ But the first question he received during a brief question-and-answer session was about his growing split with Trump, which is particularly stark given the years he spent as the former president’s most loyal sidekick.

Pence denied the two “differ on issues,” but acknowledged, “we may differ on focus.”

“I truly do believe that elections are about the future and that it’s absolutely essential, at a time when so many Americans are hurting and so many families are struggling, that we don’t give way to the temptation to look back,” he said.

Trump has spent much of his time since leaving office spreading lies about his loss to sow doubt about Biden’s victory. Indeed, even as the House Jan. 6 committee has been laying bare his attempts to remain in power and his refusal to call off a violent mob of his supporters as they tried to halt the peaceful transition of power, Trump has continued to try to pressure officials to overturn Biden’s win, despite there being no legal means to decertify it.

Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer while he was serving in the West Wing, he wrote in an upcoming memoir set to be published next month.

“On the morning that I traveled to Texas to attend the opening of a Louis Vuitton factory, White House physician Sean Conley pulled me into the medical cabin on Air Force One,” Kushner wrote in “Breaking History: A White House Memoir,” to be published on Aug. 23, according to an excerpt about his illness provided to The New York Times.

“‘Your test results came back from Walter Reed,’ he said. ‘It looks like you have cancer. We need to schedule a surgery right away.’”

Kushner wrote that he asked the doctor to wait and come to his office the next day. “Please don’t tell anyone — especially my wife or my father-in-law,” he said he told Conley.

The cancer in Kushner’s thyroid was detected in October 2019, as he was involved in discussions over a trade deal with China.

Kushner wrote that the cancer was caught “early” but required removing a “substantial part of my thyroid” and that he was warned that there could be lingering damage to his voice.

His illness was one of the few pieces of information that did not leak out of one of the leakiest White Houses in modern memory.

The House Democrats’ official campaign arm is stepping into a Western Michigan Republican primary to elevate a candidate endorsed by former president Donald Trump against one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him.

The $425,000 advertising run is the latest in a slew of Democratic efforts to draw attention to far-right candidates, hoping that they will be easier to beat in November than more mainstream Republicans. But in this case, it could also be seen as a slap to Representative Peter Meijer, the incumbent in the Grand Rapids-area district who braved blowback from his own party over his vote to impeach Trump and is now fighting skulduggery from the right and the left.

The ad, which began airing Tuesday and was openly cut and funded by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, proclaims that John Gibbs, who is challenging Meijer, is “too conservative” for West Michigan. But in tone and content, it is clearly meant to appeal to pro-Trump voters in the Aug. 2 Republican primary, hailing Gibbs as “hand-picked by Trump to run for Congress,” buffing his bona fides as an aide in the Trump administration and promising that he would push “that same conservative agenda in Congress,” including a hard line against illegal immigration and a stand for “patriotic education.”

It is similar to an advertisement run by the House Democratic super PAC that unsuccessfully tried to bolster a pro-Trump candidate against Representative David Valadao in California, another of the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment. That ad infuriated even some Democrats.

Work at Boston Globe Media