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GOP officials and operatives turn up to bash Trump: ‘I think he’s the only Republican who could lose’

November 16, 2022 | | Print Article

GOP officials and operatives across the board, some of them former members of Donald Trump’s first administration, are turning against the former president faster than the speed of light in the wake of his announcing his second bid for the presidency late Tuesday evening.

First up is former Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney. Speaking on CNN late Tuesday around the time that the former president’s reelection rally was occurring, he was asked whether he thought Trump’s reelection announcement “is good for the Republican Party.” He answered no.

“No, I don’t, because I think he’s the only Republican who could lose. If he wins in 2024, now he’s the candidate, he is the likely Republican nominee. … But that means the 2024 race is not about Joe Biden or whatever Democrat is on the ticket, not about inflation, not about world events, not about abortion,” he said.

“It will be about Donald Trump, the same thing we saw in 2020. No one voted for Joe Biden. Everybody voted for or against Donald Trump. It was a referendum on him. And that’s what we’re hurtling toward in 2024. And I don’t see the outcome being any different two years from now than it was two years ago,” Mulvaney added.

Listen:

Next up was former Vice President Mike Pence. Even he appeared to boast serious doubts about Trump’s electability.

Appearing on Fox News’s “Special Report” earlier Tuesday, he was asked by host Bret Baier for his thoughts on the former president’s reelection bid.

“As I have traveled around the country over the last two years, what I hear again and again, Bret, is that people want to see us return to the policies of the Trump-Pence administration, but I hear people saying that they would like us to move forward with leadership that will unite our country around our highest ideals, and reflect the kind of respect and civility that the American people demonstrate to each other every day,” he replied.

This prompted Baier to ask, “So you wouldn’t vote for [Trump]?”

“I honestly believe that we’re going to have better choices, Bret,” Pence responded.

Listen:

Next is New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican.

“He’s doing it from a place of defensiveness, of his own self-opportunity and weakness. So he’s announcing he’s going to run for president at a low point in his political career. I don’t know how that’s going to work out, man,” he said during an interview with The Washington Post earlier Tuesday.

 

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie meanwhile “received huge applause at an annual meeting of Republican governors Tuesday morning after blaming former President Trump for GOP failures in the last three elections,” according to Axios.

He reportedly said, “The only winning that has been done since Donald Trump has been president is for Donald Trump. How about this? When Donald Trump won in 2016 he said we were going to get so tired of winning we would ask him to stop winning so much. In 2018 we lose the House. In 2020 we lose the Senate and the White House.”

Then there’s Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson:

And last up is top GOP donor Ricky Caplin, who reportedly said this at the governors’ meet-up Tuesday: “I have tremendous respect for President Trump and the effectiveness of some of his policies and initiatives, but I think it’s time for a change for our party and country.”

All this comes amid days of infighting among Republicans over who deserves blame for the GOP’s poor performance during this year’s midterm elections.

Many conservatives blame Trump because of his choice of nominees: Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, Kari Lake, etc.

Included among these conservatives is Christie.

“We nominated some bad candidates, especially on the Senate side. That’s something we’ve been talking about since the summer, and people thought that maybe the overall atmosphere of the poor performance of the economy, crime issues and others would overwhelm that. That’s what I thought would happen. It didn’t,” he said on ABC News over the weekend.

Other conservatives, meanwhile, blame the GOP’s lack of mail-in-ballot and ballot harvesting game. These conservatives specifically believe Republicans have made a vital mistake by allowing Democrats to dominate the early voting scene instead of getting actively involved in it themselves.

“I think that we have to agree at this point, these COVID-based policies of early voting that essentially create months-long periods where people are voting in Pennsylvania for 50 days … those are things that we can gripe about and we can complain about and we know is wrong, but they’re not going away,” one such conservative, Spectator World editor-at-large Ben Domenech, told Fox News last week.

“And I think that, unfortunately, Republicans are going to have to have strategies where they target the early voting,” he added.

Trump’s stance is reportedly the opposite:

Vivek Saxena
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