As Trump’s star wanes, rivals signal presidential
nomination campaigns
Republicans vying for the party’s nomination have
taken the ex-president’s midterm losses as a sign for them to step up
Edward
Helmore
Tue 27 Dec
2022 02.30 EST
Potential
rivals to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will
this week be reading the runes of political fortune with their families ahead
of the New Year – typically the time that nomination contenders begin to make
themselves formally apparent.
Amid a
lackluster start to Trump’s own campaign and a string of scandals and setbacks
to hit the former US president due to his links to far-right extremists and his
own legal problems, a field of potential rivals is starting to emerge for a
contest that only a few months ago many thought was Trump’s alone for the
taking.
They
include multiple ex-members of Trump’s own cabinet, including his own former
vice-president, his former UN ambassador and his former spy chief. Adding to
that are a raft of rivals with their own political power bases, such as
Florida’s increasingly formidable right-wing governor, Ron DeSantis.
Now the
hints of ambitions to taking on Trump are coming thick and fast, especially in
the wake of the defeat of a host of Trump-backed candidates in November’s
midterm elections which have triggered a reckoning with Trump’s grip on the
Republican party.
“I can tell
you that my wife and I will take some time when our kids are home this
Christmas – we’re going to give prayerful consideration about what role we
might play,” former vice-president Mike Pence, 63, told CBS’ Face the Nation
last month.
Maryland’s
term-limited Republican governor Larry Hogan, and Nikki Haley, South Carolina’s
former governor and US ambassador to the UN, have said the holidays would also
be a time for deliberation.
“We are taking
the holidays to kind of look at what the situation is,” Haley said in November.
Hogan, a fierce critic of Trump, told CBS last week “it won’t be shocking if I
were to bring the subject up” with his family during the break. Come January,
he said, he would begin taking advice to “try to figure out what the future
is”.
“I don’t
feel any pressure or any rush to make a decision ... things are gonna look
completely different three months from now or six months from now than they did
today,” Hogan, 66, added.
Others in
the running are also readily apparent. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s
team has reached out to potential campaign staff in early primary states, the
Washington Post reported over the weekend. “We figured by the first quarter
next year, we need to be hard at it if we’re going to do it,” Pompeo, 58, said
in an interview with Fox News.
Arkansas
governor Asa Hutchinson is reportedly talking to donors to determine his
ability to fund the 18-month “endurance race” of a nomination process. Hutchinson
has said that Trump’s early declaration, on 15 November, had “accelerated
everyone’s time frame”.
America does better when its leaders are rooted in
today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday
Stephen Schwarzman
“So the
first quarter of next year, you either need to be in or out,” the outgoing,
72-year-old governor told NBC News earlier this month.
New
Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, 48, said this week he doesn’t believe Trump
could win in 2024. He’s voiced concerns that the Republican party could repeat
the nomination experience of 2016, when he was a contender, when a large,
divided field allowed Trump’s “ drain the swamp” insurgent candidacy to
triumph.
“We just
have to find another candidate at this point,” Sununu told CBS News. While
Trump could be the Republican nominee, he added, he’s “not going to be able to
close the deal”.
Virginia
governor Glenn Youngkin, 56, has said he’s “humbled” to be part of the 2024
discussions but in the convention of most candidates, he’s focused on his day
job.
Youngkin
telegraphed his fiscal conservative credentials to wider Republican big-money
interests by pushing $4bn in tax cuts through the Virginia legislature and
meeting with party megadonors in Manhattan in June.
“2024 is a
long way away,” he recently told Fox News. “We’ll see what happens”.
Helping to
break the gender-lock on potential candidates is also South Dakota governor
Kristi Noem. Her name has emerged as a potential Trump running mate, but she
recently said he did not present “the best chance” for Republicans in 2024.
“Our job is
not just to talk to people who love Trump or hate Trump,” Noem, 51, told the
New York Times in November. “Our job is to talk to every single American.”
The biggest
dog in the potential race – aside from Trump himself – is by far Florida’s
DeSantis, who recently won re-election in his state by a landslide. Some of the
Republican party’s biggest donors have already transferred their favors from
Trump, 78, toward the 44-year-old governor.
Republican
mega donor and billionaire Ken Griffin, who moved his hedge fund Citadel from
Chicago to Miami last year, described Trump as a “three-time loser” to
Bloomberg a day after the former president’s declaration.
“I don’t
know what he’s going to do. It’s a huge personal decision,” Griffin said of
DeSantis. “He has a tremendous record as governor of Florida, and our country
would be well-served by him as president.”
The country would be better off if each party’s
standard bearer came from a new generation
Karl Rove
Similarly,
Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of private-equity giant Blackstone, told Axios he was
withdrawing his support from Trump for 2024 but stopped short of backing
DeSantis. “America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and
tomorrow, not today and yesterday,” he said. “It is time for the Republican
party to turn to a new generation of leaders.”
DeSantis
has yet to rule a run in or out, but has signaled his interest by beginning to
plant ads on Google and Facebook that target an audience beyond Florida.
But in the
post-midterm political environment, with Trump-backed candidates performing
poorly in most contests, and the former president besieged by investigations
and questions about his associations, the running is open.
Maryland’s
Hogan has described Trump as vulnerable, and “he seems to be dropping every
day”. Hutchinson has said “you never know when that early front-runner is going
to stumble”. Polls suggest Trump trails DeSantis in a nomination head-to-head,
but leads over Pence and Haley.
Other
potential names in the pot include Texas governor Greg Abbott, 65; Florida
senator Rick Scott, also 65; former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, 60; and
Texas senator Ted Cruz, 52, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2016.
In a
provocatively titled “OK Boomers, Let Go of the Presidency” column last week,
former George W Bush advisor Karl Rove warned that 2024 may resemble 1960 when
voters were ready for a generational shift. In that year, they went for the
youngest in the field, John F Kennedy, aged 43.
“Americans
want leaders who focus on the future,” Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “The
country would be better off if each party’s standard bearer came from a new
generation … It’s time for the baby boomers and their elders to depart the
presidential stage. The party that grasps this has the advantage come
2024”
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