A bevy of potential Republican presidential candidates stood up to challenge Donald Trump over the weekend, and anti-Trump conservative Charlie Sykes said there was something different this time.
Republicans with their own White House aspirations made clear at this weekend's Republican Jewish Coalition conference that the party should move on from the former president, who announced his 2024 campaign last week, and Sykes told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Trump's gambit had failed to pay off.
"Donald Trump did not sweep the field by preemptively getting into the race," Sykes said. "Nobody backed away. If, in fact, he did have an iron grip on the party, and he is still the dominant force in the party, you would have thought that other candidates would have backed away from a direct challenge. They didn't."
However, Sykes said Republicans haven't turned the page just yet.
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"Listening to my good friend Paul Ryan, and I wish he would have said these things a long time ago, you'll notice he's confining himself to saying that Trump is a loser," Sykes said. "I think this is important that Republicans, I think this is a significant development, Republicans are now saying we need to turn the page, we need to move on. He will lose for us, and maybe that will hit with primary voters, but then he was asked the question, what if Donald Trump became president again, what would that mean, and he's not willing to say Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States."
"He is unwilling to say it's not just a matter of winning and losing, but this is a man who lacks the character to be president of the United States," Sykes added. "That he does pose an existential threat to our democratic order, and so I wonder whether or not it's necessary that Republicans notice he's a loser, but I wonder whether it's sufficient because if you're going to continue to say he was a great president, and I was proud to work with him. It's all about losing, I'm not sure that's going to be enough to dethrone Donald Trump."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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