Donald Trump should drop out of the 2024 race for the White House because polling shows the former US president trailing Joe Biden as he grapples with more than 90 pending criminal charges, according to the Republican US senator Bill Cassidy.
Cassidy’s comments to the State of the Union host, Kasie Hunt, on Sunday were not the first time he has denounced Trump. About two months earlier, he went on CNN and predicted that Trump would lose if his party nominated him to run for the Oval Office again, citing the poor performance of his endorsed candidates during the 2022 midterms.
“Obviously, that’s up to him … but he will lose to Joe Biden, if you look at the current polls,” Cassidy said of his fellow Republican and the ex-president on State of the Union.
The Louisiana senator added that it would do their party no good if Trump “ends up getting the nomination but cannot win a general [election]” against the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.
Alluding to a Republican presidential candidates’ debate scheduled Wednesday in Milwaukee that Trump intends to skip, Cassidy said: “I want one of them to win.” But he passed on an opportunity to single out any of the expected debate participants as someone he supported and assured he would vote for “a Republican” if Trump stayed in the race.
A poll by CBS News on Sunday showed Trump at the moment enjoys 62% support among Republicans, with many of them trusting him more than they do their friends, family and religious leaders. But polling for now shows Biden generally is ahead of Trump, whose next closest rival for the Republican nomination – Florida governor Ron DeSantis – is culling just 16% support among his party’s voters.
Trump has established his domination so far in the Republican presidential primary despite facing 91 criminal charges across four separate indictments filed against him for his alleged 2020 election subversion, illicit retention of classified documents and hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
On Sunday’s edition of State of the Union, Cassidy said to him it seemed like the classified documents case was “almost a slam dunk”.
“I’m not an attorney,” said Cassidy, who is a gastroenterologist. But, while referring to an audio recording of Trump discussing military secrets that he had not declassified at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club in 2021, Cassidy remarked: “The mishandling of the federal documents … seems … a very strong case.
“They have a tape recording of him speaking of it. If that is proven, then we may have a candidate for president who has been convicted of a crime. I think Joe Biden needs to be replaced, but I don’t think Americans will vote for someone who’s been convicted. So, I’m just very sorry about how all this is playing out.”
Cassidy joined six other Senate Republicans who voted to convict the former president when Trump was impeached after his supporters staged the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.
Trump had more than enough votes to be acquitted at his impeachment trial despite the lack of support from Cassidy, whom the former president has previously dismissed as a “Rino”, the acronym meaning “Republican in name only”.
Cassidy is in his second six-year term in the Senate and is not up for re-election until 2026.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
