Gov Sununu: “We’ve Got to Make Sure Trump Isn’t the Nominee”

AMANPOUR CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Popular New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu, has decided on his strategy to move his party away from Trump, and it’s by not running for president. Sununu’s announcement surprised and puzzled political observers. Here he is before the indictment dropped, explaining his rationale to Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Governor Sununu, welcome to the show.

GOV. CHRIS SUNUNU (R-NH): Thank you for having me on.

ISAACSON: So, you just wrote an op-ed piece saying you thought you had a path to victory to the Republican nomination, everybody has been talking about you as a new face of the Republican Party, but then you said, I’m not going to run. Explain that to me.

SUNUNU: Well, look, the party is going through a tough time right now in terms of messaging, in terms of making sure that we get independents back on board, our young voters back on board, that all has to happen to be successful in November. And I came to the conclusion that, yes, there’s isa path, not easy, of course, but there was a path, but it doesn’t have to be the Chris Sununu Show. I mean, you’re going to have another dozen candidates on that stage anyways. I want to and I enjoy spending my time, I think there is value on my time, showing the New Hampshire model, how do you get stuff done and hopefully, encouraging, inspiring some of those candidates on a more national level and making sure we have a strong ticket. Not just a strong presidential candidate, but you got to have a strong ticket or else 2022 is going to repeat itself, and that’s no good for Republicans. And I just think we don’t have to change who we are, we just have to kind of get back to the basics of what we’re about, because that can be inspirational, folks, when you talk about low taxes or limited government, local control, all these things that really matter. And finally, the most important thing, making sure — as the governor of the New Hampshire first in the nation primary, making sure the candidates are talking about things moving forward, not just relitigating the past, because that is a surefire way to lose a race in 2024 with the wrong nominee.

So, making sure we’re talking about inflation, we’re talking about border security, we’re talking about energy independence, all of these things that Republicans are frankly very, very good at and that can really impact people’s lives at a direct level and not get the message confused by, you know, a lot of the other things we’re kind of — we confused ourselves with. And we do it to ourselves. It’s just the way Republicans are. We tend to do it to ourselves. We’re really good at the job sometimes, but we’re really terrible at messaging. I just want to be a part of something a little bigger and a little more inspirational for the best the party and ultimately, the country.

ISAACSON: You know, that sounded like a pretty passionate stump speech. So, I think I’m still confused, why aren’t you doing this?

SUNUNU: Because, again, it doesn’t have to be about me. Remember, I’m also managing the first in the nation primary. I want all the candidates to come to New Hampshire and feel — you know, understand the value of retail politics, to be one of — if they were maybe four or five or six candidates on the stage, maybe the decision might be a little different, but there’s going to be like a dozen candidates there. If Trump wasn’t 40 points up on most of the other candidates right now, maybe that would — I’d make a bit of a different decision. But a lot of Republicans are just thinking in the past as opposed to thinking in the future, and we got to make sure Donald Trump isn’t the nominee. If — for anything, he can’t win. It’s not personal with the former president. You just can’t mathematically win in November of ’24. So, I can be a bigger — I think much more helpful to the party in those successes. It’s a team game. It really is. It can’t just be about, you know, a single individual. We have to think a little bigger than ourselves sometimes.

ISAACSON: You just said that it can’t win if Trump’s the nominee. That he’s — it’s sort of a path to a loss again. And that’s what you’ve said in your “Washington Post” editorial. Is that the main reason you’re against nominating Trump or do you think Trump is not really fit to be president now?

SUNUNU: No. For me, the main reason is he can’t win. And he drags the whole ticket down. It isn’t just about him. He cost us U.S. Senate seats in ’22. He cost us governorships. He’s cost House seats. Luckily, we got a few of them back, but not nearly as many as we should. He cost the entire — look, he cost us school board seats, because you have Republicans that have to try to justify why the Republican, and they might be on the same team as Donald Trump, and even a school board member gets their messaging all twisted up because of this guy. So, he’s costing Republicans up and down the ballot across the country, it’s just — it’s really that simple. And the data is right there. That’s not speculation. You have a candidate — if you were the nominee — that he couldn’t even win Georgia. I mean, that’s been proven. And he’s lost us seats in a state like Georgia. And if you can’t win Georgia, I will use that as the example, as a Republican, game over, lights out, there’s no electoral path to victory, right?

So, right there, that tells you, it ain’t going to happen if he’s the nominee. He’s going to cost us seats. It’s best for the party, and it’s best for America, to have one of these other candidates, and there’s a lot of really good ones out there to choose one. It doesn’t — again, it doesn’t just have to be me. A lot of other good candidates to choose from to make sure the party is moving forward in a positive way and driving forward on a really positive Republican ticket to be successful in ’24.

ISAACSON: But are there other things about Trump, including the January 6th insurrection and the many things that he’s done that would make you not want to vote for Trump?

SUNUNU: Well, look, I think it makes a lot of people not want to vote for Trump. I mean, that — it’s not — again, it’s not just about me, it has pushed a lot of independents off, it has disenfranchised a lot of young voters in a very negative way that — and it just cost us all the time. So, it’s not — again, it’s not just me, a lot of folks. You know, the former president, after 2020, had a choice of what attitude to take, what path to take. And the path he chose really put him in a very difficult position, and ultimately, as one of the leading voices in our party, our party in a very precarious position. And we paid for it dearly in ’22. We lost. We should’ve had 53, maybe even 54 U.S. Senate seats, and we lost them. Because, I mean, you had Democrats that were so confident that Trump and his message were bad, they were funding Republican candidates that carried his message that were his candidates, they were funding them to make sure they won their primaries. That’s how confident Democrats are in beating Republicans in the Trump message. And it worked. And it worked. Why would we do that again?

ISAACSON: I want to push back a bit, though, which is, you’re right. All the things you have said about the losses or the things you didn’t win under the Trump banner, but the Republican Party has actually done pretty well. I mean, you got a state in which both houses of your legislature are now Republican, the governorship’s Republican. That’s happening, I think, in 22 states. They’re fully in control.

SUNUNU: Yes.

ISAACSON: Actually, did hold the House of Representatives. DeSantis won with a Trump-like message, with a very large vote in Florida. Is there

something — I mean, it seems to me that Trump-like message isn’t quite as toxic as you said.

SUNUNU: Well, not at the state level. So, states are very different. I think the American people really appreciate, partly through the COVID — in the pandemic process, they really appreciate the very vast difference between the federal government and state government, their legislatures. Folks can have a much more impactful say in what the things that hit their lives on a day-to-day basis with their legislature, with their governorships. And so, I think Republicans can be very successful there.

Virtually, every state has a balanced budget amendment, right? The federal government doesn’t play by those rules. The federal government doesn’t really get anything done. You know, so there’s a lot of more — there’s a lot more of the checks and balances built into the system at the state level, and people appreciate it. So, Republicans can separate themselves on state issues there and not necessarily have to be completely blanketed.

But in the U.S. Senate, the congressional seats, we should have a lot more seats. And frankly, we — you know, it would be great if had a president that could have actually won in 2020. If you can’t win in 2020 — I mean, think of it this way, are there any independents that didn’t vote for the former president in 2020 that are changing their minds and are now going to vote for the guy? No. Like zero. Like literally zero. He’s one of the most known political commodities of the 21st century. There’s no middle ground with the former president. You’re either with him or you’re not. And the math says, way more people aren’t with him, they’re not willing to budge at all. So, we have the opportunity to move on. And why wouldn’t we? Why would we go backwards? We’re not a country that goes backwards. We’re not a country that says, I want last year’s version

of something or the old ideas or old leadership. We always want the new, bigger, better version of things. The update, if you will. The new idea, the new individual, the new innovation. And so, that’s what — that’s why you go through elections. You don’t go through elections to go backwards, you go through elections to move forward.

ISAACSON: By my gray hair, you can probably can tell I’m old enough to remember your father quite well. I knew him. And he represented a very conservative, very Republican, very traditionalist party with, you know, ideals that were very clear. And it had been that way for 20 or 30 years. Suddenly, the party — I won’t say suddenly, but in the age of Trump, the party has been pulled away from so many of those ideals. I could go down the litany, but you could probably do it better than I can. What’s happened to the Republican Party and why does it change so radically in the age of Trump?

SUNUNU: Well, let’s be fair, the litany of ideals on the Democrat Party have drastically changed. I mean, the fact that — you know, we used to make jokes about the green new deal, we used to make jokes about socialism, and now, a huge portion of the Democrat Party identifies as socialism isn’t so bad, right?

ISAACSON: All right. I’ll have a Democrat on and —

SUNUNU: So, both parties that seen this —

ISAACSON: — question him. But let me just restate the question, which is, hasn’t the Republican Party shifted, not just to the right, but to a whole new set of attitudes and resentments?

SUNUNU: No, I don’t think that’s fair to say. I think that there’s a lot of — the microphones are given to the extremes. I think media and social media plays right into that. You know, the media and social media like to play right into trying — again, to the Trump’s ideal of relitigating old stuff and talking about the 2020 election and January 6th and all of this sort of stuff.

And so, no, I don’t think it’s — we’re not moving. It’s not that we’re moving, it’s that our messaging, I think, it’s getting clouded. I think some of our messaging does get co-opted by extremes but doesn’t represent the vast majority. If Trump were in a race, one-on-one with another candidate, he loses. Unquestionably. He will lose. And so, it’s not that those ideal and that extremism has co-opted the whole party, right now, it’s just co-opted the microphones. And we have to appreciate that, take responsibility for it and move forward.

ISAACSON: Are you going to endorse somebody before the New Hampshire primary?

SUNUNU: I plan on it. Yes, I definitely on it. I mean, we’ll — I couldn’t tell you who is it going to be. I don’t know, to be honest. You know, we’ll see kind of who goes where over the next few months. But I’ve been very clear, I think we need to be strong as a party, not make the mistakes of 2016, and helping narrow this field down earlier than later. And that means, by Thanksgiving or Christmas at this year, if you’re not doing well in the polls, thanks for playing. Great job. Got to get out of the race. We got to narrow this thing down pretty darn quickly. And I think the candidates understand that themselves. I think they know that there is a time leash factor here.

We’re not going to let this go to super Tuesday without narrowing it down between likely Former President Trump and one other candidate. And then, you will see, I think, a lot of opportunity for that next generation, that next movement of the Republican Party to move forward with a clear conscience.

ISAACSON: Who do you feel has the most optimistic type messages?

SUNUNU: Oh, boy. That’s really interesting. Well, of the current candidates, you know, I don’t — I can’t say off top of my head. I think they’re all optimistic in different ways, right? I think governors are very optimistic, because governors always feel like they can get stuff done because they’re held accountable all the time. I think — you know, I think Vice President Pence, I got to say, I think he has a very optimistic tone. He’s a great guy. He’s gone, you know, up and down in terms of the pressures he’s had to withstand and he believes in this country very strongly. I think he’s great. I think Nikki Haley has a great — a sense of what happens at the state and national and international level. She brings a really unique perspective in that way. And again, she’s had a lot of pressure on her, but overcome a lot. So, they all come from very different backgrounds, but let’s see what this offer. Let’s see where they go with it. Let’s see how they sell it and the experience and examples they can put behind it to be that inspiration we all want to see.

ISAACSON: So, you had a line in your op-ed that leaked out at me, which is, candidates should not get into this race to further a vanity campaign or to sell books or to audition to be vice president. Who were you calling out?

SUNUNU: No one in — look, I don’t think anyone — I’m not going to say any names individually. But there’s clearly some candidates there that either clearly don’t have a shot but want to get in to be considered V.P. Some candidates that I don’t think are being tough enough on the former president, and you got to call him out for what he didn’t do. You got to call him out for not draining the swamp. You got to call him out for not securing the border. You got to call him out for, you know, wrapping his arms around Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, and saying, he did a better job than the Republican governors, you know, specifically Ron DeSantis. I mean, nobody thinks Andrew Cuomo did a better job —

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AMANPOUR: So, we are taking a break now from this program to go to CNN USA, with more details on Trump’s indictment being unsealed.

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