Reflecting on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s flip-flopping support for Donald Trump, former policy adviser for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign Lanhee Chen said Wednesday that it’s a pattern of behavior we’re likely to continue seeing from 2024 Republican presidential candidates.
That will hold true, Chen said, despite the fact that they’re running to beat the former president and that he “probably violated several federal laws.”
The “Morning Joe” discussion about 2024 candidates like Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley began Wednesday when Jonathan Lemire noted that “some of the Republican candidates on the trail who are also vying for the nomination have started to go after him,” but not in the ways one might expect a competitor to take aim at a political adversary.
“Chris Christie has a lot, but other than him, it’s pretty rare,” Lemire said. “We heard from Nikki Haley yesterday a little bit, just very specifically on China. DeSantis has done it once in awhile.”
The “Morning Joe” moderator then asked Chen, “As you talk to people in the party, do you see any sort of sea change there where more of them might need to take him on knowing they have to beat him?”
“You know, politics is a pure marketplace, right?” Chen began. “People are going to react to whatever will sell well. So the challenge is that for many of these candidates, they see the same numbers that all the rest of us see, and the numbers they see tell them that support for the former president is still a significant factor in determining whether a Republican primary voter will support a particular candidate.”
He further explained that their’s is a “tightrope you have to walk” between Trump adversary and ally — “appearing as though you still are in theory supportive of Trump while at the same time trying to distinguish your own lane. It is a very difficult balancing act.”
Muddying the waters even further are the two indictments the former president currently faces out of New York and Florida, to which Chen said he is probably guilty on multiple of the 37 federal counts.
“It is very hard on the one hand to run against someone, and then on the other hand to say, ‘Well, I kind of like them and I still support them,’ when the fundamental challenge is you’ve got someone who probably violated several federal laws. So I just don’t think that this particular balance is going to shift until the Republican primary electorate demonstrates that it’s interested in moving on from Trump.”
Watch the full “Morning Joe” discussion in the video above.
