Trump’s Attacks On Republicans Will Cost Him Georgia, Arizona, and Maybe Even Florida in 2024, Argues Ex-Chief of Staff

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Mick Mulvaney, a former acting chief of staff for President Donald Trump, argued in The Hill this week that the Republican Party will lose key states in 2024 if Trump is their nominee yet again.

Mulvaney penned an op-ed titled, “Donald Trump has a 2024 math problem,” in which he recalled some private conversations he had with then president Trump regarding his 2020 electoral strategy and his attacks on late Sen. John McCain.

“The former president is really good at subtraction and division — and really, really lousy at addition,” Mulvaney declared at the beginning of his piece, setting up his argument that Trump’s attacks on other Republicans have only cost the party votes.

“When I was in Trump’s White House, I remember asking him about the political advisability of continuing his long-running feud with Sen. John McCain, even after the Arizona Republican was dead and buried,” Mulvaney recalled.

“He’s a horrible person,” Trump shot back, wrote Mulvaney, who then noted he had his own past gripes with McCain.

Mulvaney then summed up what he told Trump would be the cost of continuing to attack McCain:

But I put it to Trump simply: There was not a single voter in this country, I told him, who had not voted for him in 2016 but might change his or her mind in 2020 due to his flogging of McCain’s corpse. And there may well be some who did vote for Trump in 2016 who would not do so in 2020 because of it. Especially, say, in Arizona, a state that Trump won by just 90,000 votes in 2016 and then lost by 10,000 in 2020.

Mulvaney went on to label Trump’s attacks on McCain as “Trump subtraction” and adds, “It’s not an isolated case.”

Mulvaney then recalled a recent conversation “with a friend of mine who is a high-ranking Republican from Georgia”:

“I’ve got a question about 2024,” I said.

He didn’t even wait for me to ask: “You are going to ask me if Trump can win Georgia in 2024. And I am telling you the answer is no. Absolutely not. No chance.”

Mulvaney recapped Trump’s many attacks on popular incumbent GOP Gov. Brian Kemp (R), including declaring Stacey Abrams would have been better. “People don’t forget that kind of thing where I’m from,” Mulvaney then quotes his friend as saying, before breaking down the math in Georgia:

Trump beat Hillary Clinton by more than 200,000 votes in Georgia in 2016. In 2020, he lost by the now infamous 11,779 votes that Kemp and other Republicans correctly refused to ‘find’ for him.

Finally, Mulvaney noted that Trump is repeating all his old mistakes in Florida by launching wild political attacks on Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

“Trump did himself no favors there when he recently suggested that disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) did a better job than DeSantis in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. No Republican, either in Florida or outside of it, believes that,” he concluded.