A Republican governor says Trump can’t win another term: Donald Trump may have won the CPAC straw poll this weekend, but one Republican governor says he can’t win again in 2024.
Donald Trump Hits CPAC
Donald Trump appeared for his customary keynote speech at CPAC over the weekend, delivering a speech that ran for more than 90 minutes.
“Change only happens if we plow fearlessly ahead and declare with one voice that the era of woke and weaponized government is over. That is our task, that is our mission. And this is the turning point and the time for that decision,” Trump said in the speech, which took place as CPAC returned to Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Maryland for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
The speech was described as “wildly dishonest” by CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale, who added that the address was “filled with wildly inaccurate claims about his own presidency, Joe Biden’s presidency, foreign affairs, crime, elections, and other subjects.”
The former president, for example, had falsely claimed that he was the only president in which “Russia didn’t take over a country during my term.”
Trump also dominated the event’s presidential straw poll, earning 62 percent of the vote, compared to 20 percent for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who did not appear at the event.
Not Everyone in the GOP Is MAGA
Also on Sunday, it became clear once again that not everyone in the Republican Party wants Trump to lead them.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu appeared Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and made clear that not only does he oppose Trump getting the nomination, but believes that he won’t get it.
“He’s not going to be the nominee, that’s just not going to happen,” Sununu said on the show, per Axios. “Thank you for your service, we’re moving on… I just don’t believe the Republican Party is going to say that the best leadership for America tomorrow is yesterday’s leadership. That doesn’t make any sense.”
He also denounced “crying about what happened in November 2020.”
Sununu’s opinion is crucial because he’s the popular governor of New Hampshire, where the first Republican primary is held.
He also predicted on the show that if the primary were held today, Ron DeSantis would win the primaries in New Hampshire and Florida.
The governor did say, however, that he would support the eventual Republican nominee, and ripped the Biden Administration as “real left-wing extreme agenda type stuff that is not in the best interests of this country.”
Sununu did state, in February, that he was “definitely thinking about” running for president himself.
And the lane is somewhat cleared in the anti-Trump wing, with the news over the weekend that Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, has decided to not run for president in 2024.
Hogan, in a New York Times piece announcing the decision, made clear that he doesn’t want to put his family through a campaign, nor does he want to “sell books or position myself for a cabinet role,” which some past no-hope presidential candidates have done.
He also expressed his desire to avoid a “pileup” like in 2016, when Trump emerged from a large field.
“Since Donald Trump won the nomination in 2016, I have fought to make clear that our party cannot be successful if we put personality before principle if our elected officials are afraid to say publicly what they freely admit behind closed doors, and if we can’t learn from our mistakes because of the political cost of admitting facts to be true,” the former governor wrote.
Meanwhile, a story this weekend in Politico noted that very few of the candidates and potential candidates on the Republican side in 2024 have any eagerness to talk about the January 6 insurrection or to challenge Trump on it.
As pointed out by reviews, DeSantis’ newly released book, “The Courage to Be Free,” does not mention January 6 at all.
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Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
