-
Mick Mulvaney told CNN that Donald Trump is the “only Republican who stands to lose” in 2024.
-
The former president made his 2024 presidential bid official on Tuesday.
-
But some Republicans, like Mulvaney, believe he is too divisive a candidate to win.
Mick Mulvaney, the former acting White House chief of staff, criticized Donald Trump’s decision to run for president in 2024, saying he is the “only Republican who can lose” the race.
In a CNN interview on Tuesday, Mulvaney discussed Trump’s announcement that he was running a bid to regain the presidency in 2024. Host Anderson Cooper asked Mulvaney if he thought the announcement was good news for the Republican Party.
“No, i do not do it. Because I think he’s the only Republican he could lose,” Mulvaney said, adding that now that Trump is officially a nominee in the race, it’s likely he’s the Republican nominee.
Mulvaney said Trump could be beaten in a head-to-head race for the Republican nomination by a popular challenger, such as rising star Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida. However, under the Republican primary system, in which votes will be spread among multiple candidates, Trump is likely to get a higher percentage than any of his rivals and therefore win the nomination, Mulvaney said.
He added that if Trump is the GOP nominee, the election will not be about core issues where President Joe Biden is vulnerable, such as inflation or education, but will be a referendum on Trump’s popularity, which he will lose.
“It will be about Donald Trump, the same thing we saw in 2020. Nobody voted for Joe Biden. Everyone voted for or against Donald Trump. It was a referendum on him,” Mulvaney said.
Trump’s announcement for 2024 has met with criticism from some Republicans, who hold the former president responsible for the poor results of the party in the midterm elections.
Trump took a central role in that election, endorsing hundreds of candidates, some of whom were defeated in key races, meaning Republicans failed to seize control of the Senate and won only a slim majority in the House.
Mulvaney served as the acting White House chief of staff from January 2019 to March 2020, then resigned as envoy to Northern Ireland after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
He has most recently worked as an analyst for media organizations, where he has criticized Trump’s post-presidential bid to regain power.
Read the original article at Business Insider