Donald Trump is no stranger to the slings and arrows of political fortune, but few would have been able to predict just how many of his former compatriots would be lining up to bash him this week.
Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday night, earlier than is tradition, but also about 18 months after everyone in the country already knew that he was going to run again. Trump doesn’t like to lose, and so he very rarely walks away from a defeat without a shot at redemption.
But, as is the case with American politics, there are always those within your inner orbit that could be looking to stick a knife in your back…including, potentially, a former Chief of Staff.
Asked on CNN if he thought Trump’s announcement at Mar-a-Lago was good for the Republican party, Mick Mulvaney said: “No I don’t. I think he’s the only Republican who could lose.”
The former South Carolina congressman was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and then his third chief of staff, in an acting capacity between 2018 and 2020. He then became the US special envoy for Northern Ireland.
Mulvaney isn’t exactly the most popular guy in the infotainment industry, however.
Mulvaney’s move into media punditry, as a voice from the Trump administration, has been widely criticised.
When CBS announced its hiring of Mulvaney earlier this year, Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post asked: “Why hire this partisan … who had such an execrable record of enabling his boss’s corruption and reinforcing his lies? What journalistic purpose could this possibly serve?”
Mulvaney is just the latest in a long line of anti-Trump voices from within the former President’s administration, with perhaps the most alarming being Mike Pence, Trump’s former Vice President.
