Much was made by the media of New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu coming out this weekend to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and saying he would vote for Donald Trump in November.
The unexpected reveal made news because among prominent Republicans, Sununu was one of the most transparent Trump critics, backing Trump’s Republican rival Nikki Haley in the primaries and saying Trump had “contributed” to the insurrection on January 6.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Will your support for Trump continue even if he’s convicted?
CHRIS SUNUNU: Yeah. This has been going on for more than a year and his poll numbers never go down.
S: But you’re going to politics. I’m asking about right and wrong.
CS: This is about politics. pic.twitter.com/HfRXDAC6dg
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2024
But Sununu was never on the large list of Trump detractors who were “for him before they were against him” — people who worked under Trump in the administration and who subsequently warned the public against the dangers of a second Trump term.
As AP reports: “Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has called him a ‘threat to democracy.’ Former national security adviser John Bolton has declared him ‘unfit to be president.’ And former Vice President Mike Pence has declined to endorse him, citing ‘profound differences.’”
Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr was generally thought to be on that list too, a man who left the administration in its waning days and later told anybody who would listen that Trump acted in a “puerile” fashion and knew he’d lost the election, despite the former President’s claims otherwise.
Yet today Barr decidedly dropped off the list of Never-Again-Trumpers and joined Trump’s list, saying he would vote for “the Republican ticket” in November, positing his choice as that old saw — a lesser-of-two-evils dichotomy. Barr said it is his “duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country.”
[NOTE: No reader of Barr’s 2022 memoir, One Damn Thing After Another, would be shocked by his choice to re-up in supporting Trump; in the book — even after January 6 — Barr describes Trump’s enemies, not Biden’s, as “guerrillas engaged in a war to cripple a duly elected government.”]
Barr says now that the “progressive agenda” that has produced record jobs and record economic growth under Biden is the “real danger to the country” and that “a continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide in my opinion.”