For those of you who don’t know her work, historian Heather Cox Richardson is a professor at Boston College. She does all the usual professor stuff — publishes books, blogs, speaks, even teaches classes.
I subscribe to her daily “Letters from an American” — she publishes a new letter five days a week covering current events from both historical and forward-looking perspective.
In her piece for today, she says the GOP has dumped Trump and is moving to 2024. Well, she didn't say that in so many words but that’s what she describes.
Today two leading Republican politicians attempted to stake out turf for the 2024 (that's not a typo) presidential race, as Trump tried to strengthen his hand for the 2020 election.
This morning, Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican who has won high marks for his response to the coronavirus crisis in his state, published an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Still Standing. . . .
Hogan is clearly trying to emerge from this crisis as the voice of the anti-Trump Republicans. . . .
Even before the 2020 election, Hogan is staking out turf for the election after that. The description says: “Still Standing reveals how an unlikely governor is sparking a whole new kind of politics—and introduces the exciting possibilities that lie ahead.”
Hogan is not the only one eyeing the future. Today Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote a Washington Post op-ed and gave a fiery speech in Philadelphia to launch the draft report of the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, a committee he organized a year ago to reexamine “the nation’s founding principles.” To chair the committee, he tapped conservative legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon, who is staunchly and vocally opposed to abortion.
The commission’s report looks laughably like a campaign document, . . .
. . .
It seems Hogan is bargaining that Republicans will reject Trumpism and move left; Pompeo is bargaining that he can pull the party even further rightward to a theocracy. That the two men felt comfortable tipping their hands less than four months before the next election suggests they have decided that Trump is no longer a real threat to their future.
I recommend you read the article -- the part about Pompeo is scary.