Former President Trump’s Tuesday night 2024 reelection announcement may be the earliest by a non-incumbent in modern history, but he’s not likely to remain alone forever in his bid for the GOP nomination.
Here’s what some of the other Republicans whose names have been tossed around as potential 2024 candidates have said about Trump running for reelection.
Mike Pence
President Trump’s Vice President, who was the target of potentially murderous rioters during the January 6 insurrection, has a new autobiography out and took part in a network interview the day before Trump’s announcement.
On ABC’s World News Tonight, Mike Pence said he and his family are giving “prayerful consideration” to whether he should run for President in 2024.
Whether he thinks he could defeat Trump, he said, “Well, that would be for others to say.”
And as to whether he believes that Trump should be President again he stated, “I think that’s up to the American people. But I think we’ll have better choices in the future. People in this country actually get along pretty well once you get out of politics. And I think they want to see their national leaders start to reflect that same, that same compassion and generosity of spirit.”
Ron DeSantis
Incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida won reelection by 19+ points on Election Day, and a narrative has emerged that he is the viable alternative to Trump in 2024.
On Election Night, DeSantis declared during his victory speech, “We not only won the election, we have rewritten the political map,” as some in the crowd urged him to toss his hat in the Presidential ring by chanting, “Two more years!”
Certainly, Trump himself has put DeSantis in his crosshairs, already giving him the nickname, “Ron DeSanctimonious.”
On Tuesday ahead of Trump’s announcement, DeSantis was asked about Trump’s jabs at him. He called them “noise.”
“I would just tell people to go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night. The fact of the matter is, you know, the fact of the matter is it was the greatest Republican victory in the history of the state of Florida,” DeSantis told reporters without specifically mentioning Trump by name, adding, “We get people to vote for us who may not be in our party. And that’s really what you need to do.”
Liz Cheney
Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming was the number-three ranked House Republican before her colleagues stripped her of her leadership role in 2021 for calling out Trump’s false 2020 election claims, and she lost her state’s Republican primary this midterm.
However, she’s been a prominent voice on the national stage as the Vice Chair of the January 6 Committee investigating the insurrection on the Capitol. And there has been a lot of speculation—some of it sparked by her own remarks—that she might run for President as an independent with a common-sense conservative platform.
On the Tuesday ahead of Trump’s announcement she said she is “confident” Trump will never be President again.
“It’s important for people to look at what’s happening and what he’s doing, not just through a political lens, but through the basic facts of his total lack of fitness for office,” she said at The Washington Post’s Global Women’s Summit.
Glenn Youngkin
In 2021, Glenn Youngkin pulled off a surprising victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, becoming that state’s first Republican Governor in more than a decade.
When Trump recently took a swipe at him using some racially tinged language, the Virginia Governor responded, “I do not call people names…That’s not the way I roll and not the way I behave.”
On November 6, while Youngkin was out campaigning for Republican midterm candidates, ABC’s This Week ran a pre-recorded interview with him. Reporter Jonathan Karl asked him if he would support Trump should he run, to which Youngkin replied, “Well, at this point I’m not supporting anybody.”
When Karl asked Youngkin if he had plans to run in ’24 he said, “The reality is I’m always humbled by this question because I get it a lot,” adding, “I really have not given it any real consideration.”
Mike Pompeo
Mike Pompeo was President Trump’s second Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021. Prior to that he served in Congress as the U.S. Representative from Kansas’ fourth district.
“We’re trying to think our way though, figuring out what’s next for us,” Pompeo said on Tuesday ahead of Trump’s announcement, adding, “But what happens today or tomorrow, what some other person decides won’t have any impact on that [decision to run or not].”
Discussing the 2024 Presidential race on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio show, Pompeo said he plans to decide by the Spring.
“We need more seriousness,” he went on to say. “We need less noise. We need steady hands. We need leaders that are looking forward, not staring in the rearview mirror claiming victimhood.”
Nikki Haley
The former Governor of South Carolina and U.S. Ambassador to the UN during the Trump Administration, Nikki Haley this week mapped out what she called, “The Road to Save America,” which is being viewed as a prelude to a 2024 Presidential run.
She’s also been spending time in Iowa, as many Presidential hopefuls do.
However, speaking to reporters in April of 2021, Haley said, “I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it. That’s something that we will have a conversation about.”
After the insurrection on January 6, 2021, Haley flip-flopped in her support of Trump, at first saying, “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him,” but months later she said, “We need him in the Republican Party. I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”
She may be flip-flopping again.
Chris Sununu
On Election Day, Chris Sununu won his fourth consecutive term as Governor of New Hampshire.
On Sunday he called the stronger-than-expected performance by Democrats a “rejection of extremism.”
When ABC’s This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos pressed him to elaborate, asking, “By extremism, do you mean the politics espoused by Donald Trump?” Sununu replied, “I think there’s an extreme left and an extreme right. In this sense, I think a lot of folks are saying, ‘Look, it’s not about payback, it’s about solving problems,’ right?”
However, a week prior, on CBS’ Face the Nation, Sununu stated emphatically that Trump announcing his reelection bid won’t discourage other Republicans from running.
“First off, announcing you’re going to run for office between an election and Christmas is a terrible idea,” he asserted. “Because one thing I can say for America is we’re all going to be really happy one way or the other that the election is over come Tuesday, and everyone’s going to want to take a breath and re-engage with their families and deal with some really serious issues.”
Further declaring, “I don’t think President Biden is going to run again,” Sununu predicted, “I think both sides of the aisle are going to have maybe a dozen individuals over the next six to nine months come out and decide to run.”
