Donald Trump’s Tuesday night announcement of a new bid for the presidency went down like a lead balloon with some GOP officials—including some who worked closely with him during his time in office. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting White House chief of staff between January 2019 and March 2020, tore into the former president’s electoral credibility on CNN. When Anderson Cooper asked Mulvaney if he thought Trump’s announcement was good for the Republican party, Mulvaney said: “No, I don’t, because I think he’s the only Republican who could lose.” Mulvaney added that if Trump became the GOP nominee: “That means the 2024 race is not about Joe Biden or whatever Democrat is on the ticket, not about inflation, not about world events, not about abortion. It will be about Donald Trump, the same thing we saw in 2020. No one voted for Joe Biden. Everybody voted for or against Donald Trump. It was a referendum on him. That’s what we’re hurtling toward in 2024. And I don’t see the outcome being any different two years from now than it was two years ago.”
