‘What would any Republican be thinking saying, ‘this is a guy I’m going to run against.’…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel didn’t mince any words about the chances she saw of an outside contender ousting incumbent President Donald Trump with a challenge from the middle.
“They have the right to jump in and lose,” McDaniel said, according to media reports. “That’s fine. They’ll lose horribly.”
A short Metro ride away from the CPAC, which took place at Maryland’s National Harbor just outside Washington, D.C., House Democrats waged an all-out assault on Trump, using the testimony of attorney-turned-convicted-felon Michael Cohen to smear the president with ad-hominem innuendo on a range of issues.
But despite the partisan rancor, Trump has continued to flirt with approval ratings near the 50 percent mark and has strong support from his conservative base, as McDaniel made clear.
“The president has 93 percent approval in our party, our country is booming, jobs are coming back, wages are up, the military has been strengthened … We have put rule-of-law judges at every level of the courts,” McDaniel said, according to The Hill. “What would any Republican be thinking saying, ‘this is a guy I’m going to run against.’”
Even so, at least three former or current Republican governors are advancing plans to primary the president: Maryland’s Larry Hogan, Ohio’s John Kasich and Massachusetts’s Bill Weld.
Although it is common for a party to rally behind a successful sitting president in a re-election run, Hogan criticized the RNC in a Politico interview last week for what he claimed was its “unprecedented” favoritism.
“Typically they try to be fair arbiters of a process, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. ” … And in my opinion, it’s not the way we should be going about our politics.”
Some Trump-deranged centrists have also openly fantasized about a split-coalition ticket featuring Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, as running mate to former Vice President Joe Biden.
However, McDaniel, who is the niece of 2012 GOP presidential candidate and outspoken NeverTrumper, made that RINO fever-dream seem a bit less likely, taking a direct shot at Biden in her remarks.
“My husband said, ‘if Joe Biden were a superhero he’d be gaffe man,’” McDaniel said. “Joe Biden, go ahead and run; run on your record of stagnant wages, of jobs leaving this country … of bad trade deals, of bad foreign policies.”
She also mocked other declared candidates who are pushing the Democrats toward the extreme Left, saying they were trying to “out-Bernie Bernie.”