Businessman and reality TV personality Donald Trump will endorse former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, U.S. media reported on Wednesday.
Sources close to the Gingrich campaign confirmed Trump would endorse Gingrich, according to several television and newspaper reports.
Trump's announcement would come on Thursday, two days before the Republican caucus in Nevada, the next state in the party's presidential nominating contest, the reports said.
A spokesman for the Gingrich campaign was not immediately available for comment.
An adviser to Trump said earlier on Wednesday that Trump planned to make major announcement in Las Vegas on Thursday about the presidential race.
Trump last year flirted with a presidential run as a Republican and was derided for pushing a discredited charge that President Barack Obama, a Democrat seeking re-election, might not have been born in the United States.
He left the Republican Party in December after a presidential debate he'd planned to host fell through.