Year he endorsed your opponent and he wrote this on twitter. mark sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to make america great again. he is mia and nothing but trouble. he is better off in argentina. are you ready for that? how do you push back and make the argument that well, first off, begin with his other tweets, it s not fact walg. the fact is i m a republican and i voted republican on most issues we in fact agreed and i supported most of his issues. but what i didn t do is worship him. and too many folks these days are in this got to bow down to donald trump mode on the republican side. that s a real problem because in the doing so we re not having a robust debate about ideas like the debt, like the deficit, like spending that i think we ought to be having. have you been at all surprised at how your former congressional colleague lindsey graham has fallen in line with this president?
Base riled up? no. but it s still should be part of the conversation. we should be having that conversation in a serious way on the left as well in our primary. but i think it goes to show that the republicans who have been obsessed with deficits and debt under president obama basically blocking everything he wanted to do for the american people and now don t have any problem with deficits and debt because they just passed a large tax cut for the rich and for corporations. so i think that, you know, at least he s consistent with republican and conservative principles in term of the deficit and debt, unlike the current republicans who are in elected office. and like he said, are just worshipping donald trump. matt, why don t more republicans, because i remember a time, it wasn t really that long ago, when republicans did talk about deficits and the debt. that s no longer even part of the conversation. why is that? i think that s true. i think it happens on both side, right. i thin
Of color. as you weigh your decision, does something like that push your closer to wanting to run against him? no. i mean, my decision s based on a long-held concern in terms of the way that we re spinning our self into real troubled waters. but what i would say is this. what we see occurring is a spin cycle, if you will, of we re all trapped in a giant washing machine where donald trump is in the middle of it. he throws out some inflammatory, outrageous or crazy statement, people react to it, his advocates defend, repeat the process. i guarantee you it will be something else like this in two weeks or in three weeks that we ll be talk about and people will be ginned up on. and in that process, we re leaving aside what i think to be the most pressing national issue out there, which is are we spinning our way into oblivion and asking for real trouble? i think it s telling on that
i ve been disappointed, but everybody s got to draw their own lines as to where they are or where they aren t on on, you know, this donald trump phenomenon. if you want to run as a republican, i gather that you would run as a republican in a primary, you wouldn t run as an independent, correct? correct. you would have to convince your party to put you there on the ballot. and i m sure you ve seen this statement that the republican party chair from your state put out yesterday. the last time mark sanford had an idea this dumb it killed his governorship. how do you how do you plan to get the party on board? again, as you well know, spent a lot of years out there talking to folks. there are a lot of people who are quiet about it, but they do not approve of a lot of the crazy tweets that the president sends out. they like what he s done on judicial appointments, they like some of what he s done in terms of trying to do something on the border. but they re frustrated as i am a
Stripes and shapes say wait a minute, no, i do care about this. why have they been so quiet? why have they been so quiet over the last two years, then? well, because everything s in the orbit of donald trump. it s about him. he has ruled out taking action on the very things that drive our debt and spending conundrum. people don t want to go if you re a republican you don t want to go against him on that front. so if he s not going to lead, i m not going to lead. so you ve got the republican party frozen in place. and on the democratic side i watched two democratic presidential debates wherein there was not one question or one conversation about debt and deficit and what comes next on that front. on both sides there s sort of an unholy alliance that i think brings us that much closer to the edge of this financial presa pace that wasn t there before. we are running higher dhaebts