Sununu’s 2024 dance
Run or back off, please
Donald Trump may not be the 2024 Republican nominee for president, but neither will New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu.
Still, if the Granite State Republican were really interested in stopping Trump from becoming the Republican Party nominee for president in 2024, he would do more than just talk.
He would run against him in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary. But he won’t. Trump would beat him.
Sununu, 48, is more comfortable commenting than confronting. The same is true of former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a fellow Republican moderate and Trump critic who announced earlier that he would not run for president.
Hogan, in anticipation of a crowded field of Republican presidential candidates, said he did not want to be part of “another multicar pileup that could potentially help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination.”
It is a good excuse, but it will not stop others from running in what is expected to be a large field of Republicans, headed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who will challenge Trump for the Republican nomination.
Along those lines, Sununu said that if the New Hampshire primary were held today, DeSantis would win it, not Trump. “There is no doubt about that in my mind,” he said.
DeSantis, who has yet to announce his candidacy, is expected to visit New Hampshire in the coming days where the “anybody but Trump” crowd of Republicans, headed by Sununu, will give him a warm reception.
Nevertheless, Donald
Trump is the man to beat and the more crowded the GOP primary field is the better it is for the former president.
Trump leads the field by a large margin in all the polls with DeSantis coming in a distant second.
As things stand now, DeSantis has the best shot of besting Trump in the GOP presidential primaries.
But DeSantis, who has a solid record of achievement in Florida, would ideally need to take Trump on face-to-face in television debates to defeat him. In a field of eight or 10 candidates or more, DeSantis could get lost in the crowd.
“The more the merrier,” Trump has repeatedly said of the list of Republicans who are talking about running against him.
So far only Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nation, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have officially announced.
While Trump seems to have lost some of his 2016 swagger, he is still the man to beat in 2024, despite all the controversy and investigations he has been through since leaving the White House in 2020 and taking his loss to Joe Biden so badly.
Donald Trump is not a good loser. He is barely a good winner.
While he won the overwhelming support of the conservative Republicans at the CPAC conference in Maryland last weekend, his often doomsday speech was in sharp contrast to the powerful speech on his achievements in Florida given by DeSantis at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library the next day.
“We’ve witnessed a great American exodus from states governed by leftist politicians imposing leftist ideology and delivering poor results and you’ve seen massive gains in states like Florida who are governing according to the tried and true principles that President Ronald Reagan held dear.
Speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic, DeSantis said, “When common sense suddenly became an uncommon virtue, Florida stood as a refuge of sanity, a citadel of freedom for people throughout the United States, and indeed throughout the world, we refused to let our state descend into some type of Faustian dystopia where people’s right were curtailed and their livelihoods destroyed.”
Trump, on the other hand, spoke darkly of World War III and the end of the country if he is not elected president again. “I am the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent World War III.”
Sounding like a Biblical prophet out of the Old Testament, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
Retribution? Scary stuff, scary times.