Look out, Donald Trump. Another fellow Republican wants to challenge you for the presidency — and his name is Mark Sanford.
Politics
Yes, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford announced on Sunday that he is launching a longshot primary challenge for the 2020 Republican nomination.
“I had planned to announce that back home this week. We had a hurricane come visit us on the coast of South Carolina so that sort of disrupted plans on that front,” Sanford said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “But I am here to tell you now, that I am going to get in.”
Sanford said he is joining the race because “I think we need to have a conversation on what it means to be a Republican.” He also added that he thinks the Republican Party has lost its way on “a couple different fronts,” which was a thinly-veiled affront against Donald Trump.
With Gov. Sanford joining the contest, he becomes the 3rd Republican to mount a primary challenge against Trump, joining former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh.
Sanford has been privately considering a presidential run since January, although he faces long odds against Trump, whose approval rating among Republicans remains around 90%. Still, that has somehow not deterred him.
“I believe competition of ideas is good, not bad, for the Republican Party and for our country,” the new GOP challenger said while adding that “a big storm is coming” if the issues of debt, the deficit or government spending aren’t prioritized.
“I just got through watching two Democratic debates that offered little more than a long laundry list of new political promises that we can’t afford,” Sanford said. “I listen to the President, who rules out action on the very things that drive our debt and spending.”
Naturally, Donald Trump weighed in on Sanford’s candidacy. Not surprisingly, he called the former governor and his political announcement “irrelevant.”
Trump’s take on Sanford’s chances may not be far off. ‘The Donald’ has most everyone inside the GOP so fearful of him that Republican leaders in multiple states have threatened to cancel their 2020 presidential primaries just to provide Trump with a clear path to reelection.
Over the weekend in South Carolina, the Republican Party executive committee voted not to hold a presidential primary in 2020, while the Kansas Republican Party vowed in a tweet that it will not hold a caucus for the 2020 election because “President Trump is the elected incumbent.”
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Despite suppressive roadblocks from his own party, GOP presidential candidate Joe Walsh said that he and “other groups are going to fight legally and all other options are going to fight South Carolina and any other state that considers doing this.”
Still, even if Walsh is successful in forcing a primary in all 50 states, Trump still has another trick up his sleeve: he will rebuke all requests for a presidential debate, effectively denying his GOP rivals an important platform.
“The RNC and the Republican Party are firmly behind the President,” said RNC spokeswoman Blair Ellis, “and any effort to challenge him in a primary is bound to go absolutely nowhere.”
Okay so let me start with this. When Joe Walsh…JOE WALSH…emerges as the voice of reason within your party you know your party has gone way past the guard-rails, well beyond the bushes and into the some god-forsaken wilderness.
None of these so-called challengers to Trump have a snowballs chance in H*ll of beating Trump….and they know this. But they’re doing what they can to try to suppress support for Trump by siphoning off some Repub votes AND motivating other Repub voters (who absolutely cannot stomach Trump) a reason to simply stay home.
It appears to me that Walsh and Weld truly believe in what they’re doing. Sanford is just a mealy-mouth, opportunist still trying to restore his jacked-up reputation from his “lost while hiking on some Appalachia trail via Brazil to be with his mistress” fiasco in 2009.