Donald Trump’s campaign for president is a far cry from his victorious run for the White House in 2016, his fellow Republican and New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu said on Sunday.
“This is not the Donald Trump of 2016, don’t fool yourself,” Sununu – who recently passed on an Oval Office run of his own in part to elevate his credibility in speaking out against the ex-president – said during an interview on ABC’s This Week. “He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the fastball, he basically is droning on for 90 minutes in his long-form speeches about his legal battles, as opposed to talking about the future of this country.”
By a wide margin and even as he faces mounting criminal charges, Trump continues to lead the Republican field seeking to oust the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, from the presidency in 2024. He received a warm reception during a 10-minute speech at the Iowa Republican party’s Lincoln Day dinner on Friday but gave the worst speech “without a doubt”, Sununu said.
“Ever seen a soap opera?” Sununu continued. “They get kind of boring. The only thing worse is the rerun of a soap opera. And that’s what he’s bringing. A lot of drama to the table.”
Sununu wasn’t the only American political conservative on Sunday who verbally attacked Trump’s aspirations for a second term.
The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie also criticized Trump, saying new charges unveiled by special counsel Jack Smith this week showed how brazen and amateur the former president’s efforts to conceal classified documents from the US justice department were. The charges allege that Trump and two aides, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, attempted to delete security footage from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club the day after it was subpoenaed by the justice department.
De Oliveira allegedly told an IT worker “the boss” wanted the footage deleted. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
Referring to the family in the mob movie series The Godfather, Christie said on CNN’s State of the Union, “These guys were acting like the Corleones with no experience.
“The ‘I can declassify whatever I want’ defense is not a defense. You can declassify whatever you want when you’re president. You can’t do it by thinking about it, you can’t do it by mind melding with the documents. There’s a process you have to go through to declassify, and he knows that.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP candidate, said again on Sunday that he would pardon Trump if he was elected. Doing so, Ramaswamy said, would move the country forward.
“One of the right ways to do that is to pardon the former president of the United States from what is clearly a politicized prosecution,” he said on State of the Union.
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential hopeful, also said on Sunday that she would be inclined to pardon Trump if elected.
“We have to move forward – we’ve gotta quit living in the past, and I don’t want there to be all of this division over the fact that we have a president serving years in jail over a documents trial,” she said during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I want all of this to go away.”
The Florida governor and fellow Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis also suggested last week that he would pardon Trump.
“Well, what I’ve said is very simple – I’m going to do what’s right for the country,” DeSantis remarked in an interview with Megyn Kelly. “I don’t think it would be good for the country to have an almost 80-year-old former president go to prison.”
