Former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, a fierce critic of Donald Trump, said Sunday he would not run for the 2024 White House.
Hogan, 66, wrote in The New York Times: I don’t want my family to go on another grueling campaign just for the experience. ”
Hogan finished his second term in January, serving eight years in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-1 margin. He was his second Republican governor to be re-elected in Maryland.
Some Republicans hoped Hogan would emerge as the new top hope for a minority of “never-Trump Republicans” and challenge Trump in 2020. A year later, he said, “He had been given the right to run for president, but he didn’t.”
Hogan admits he will be at a disadvantage in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. However, he also noted that it was considered difficult to become governor in a state where the Democrats were very strong.
“Is there a way, is it worth the effort, and can I make a difference?” he recalled in an AP interview in December of his thought process on whether to run for governor. “And those are the kinds of questions I have to try to answer.”
After Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, announced that he would campaign at the White House in February, Hogan said that if Trump could benefit from his numerous rivals, he would likely be in 2024. He said he would “definitely” consider running for president. Trump candidate.
“This would be reason enough to consider never running for office,” Hogan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
In the last two presidential elections, Hogan said he did not vote for the party’s candidate, Trump. He said he wrote it in the name of the late President Ronald Reagan.
Hogan won his first term as governor in 2014, but swayed by using public campaign funds against a more well-financed candidate. As a moderate Republican businessman with financial concerns, Hogan used his frustration with various tax and fee increases over the past eight years to defeat then-Lieutenant Hogan. Governor Anthony Brown.
Although Hogan had never held an elected office before, he served as a secretary-appointment to Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich and worked in the state capital, Annapolis.
Politics also took place in the Hogan family. Hogan’s father was the only Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to vote on all three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon.
In his first year as governor, Hogan tackled the issue of pocketbooks. He lowered the toll. This was an action that could be taken without the approval of the General Assembly, long controlled by the Democrats. But he was also presented with challenges, including unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015. Hogan dispatched the National Guard to prevent further riots.
In June of the same year, he was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but continued to work while undergoing treatment. He has been in remission since his November 2015.
In 2018, he became the second Republican governor in state history to defeat former NAACP President Ben Gerus to win re-election.
Although Hogan preferred to foster bipartisan cooperation with Democrats whenever possible, he had no shortage of disagreements with Congress on particularly important issues. An overwhelming majority of Democrats were able to override Hogan’s veto. In particular, priority measures such as a costly and drastic education funding overhaul, three police measures, and legislation to expand access to abortion in the state.
Mr. Hogan got his coveted victory last year by cutting taxes for retirees. And after Hogan long criticized the state’s legislature and state legislature’s gerrymandering maps, a Maryland judge last year shattered a Democrat-drawn congressional policy. The district’s competitiveness has increased significantly.
Hogan has long been outspoken about his dislike of Trump as president.
In 2020, Hogan, who chaired the National Governors Association, criticized Trump for slowing the nation’s coronavirus testing strategy, prompting the president to dismiss the virus threat despite critical warnings from the nation’s top experts. He said he underestimated it.
“I didn’t mean to criticize the president,” Hogan said. He’s not that kind of guy.”
Hogan described the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots as “one of the darkest times in American history” and said Trump should have resigned or been removed from office.
“People trying to pretend January 6th didn’t happen is delusional. It was an attack on democracy,” Hogan told the Associated Press late last year.
Trump and Hogan were engaged in a kind of proxy war in the 2022 election. Hogan’s choice for governor was Kelly Schultz, who had served as Secretary of Labor and Secretary of Commerce in his administration. She lost the Republican primary to Trump-backed Rep. Dan Cox, who said President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory shouldn’t have been accredited, and tried to impeach Hogan for his pandemic policies. .
Cox lost by a wide margin to Democrat Wes Moore in the November general election.
In November, two weeks after Trump announced his 2024 campaign, Hogan launched his own Political Action Committee, stating that “the party and country need to move forward” from Trump, and his own He admitted speculation about his political future.
“I know there’s no shortage of naysayers, but I’ve always been the underdog and people have always counted us out, but every time, we’ve beaten the odds,” Hogan said. Added.
