As 2024 got underway, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu wasn’t just one of the Republican Party’s most notable critics of Donald Trump, he was also working to derail the candidate’s candidacy: About a month before the GOP’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary, Sununu threw his enthusiastic backing behind former Ambassador Nikki Haley.
For his trouble, Trump proceeded to spend the weeks and months that followed publicly trashing the four-term governor.
As 2024 neared its end, Sununu found himself in the unenviable role of trying to defend the indefensible in order to bolster the man who’d spent the year mocking and scolding him.
It was Sununu, for example, who tried and failed to defend Trump describing Americans he disagrees with as “the enemy within.” It was also Sununu who tried and failed to defend Trump amid reports that he said in private that he wished he had military generals like the ones who served Adolf Hitler.
And in the year’s final weekend, it was also Sununu who tried and failed to address potential conflicts of interest surrounding Elon Musk and his role in Trump’s incoming administration. HuffPost reported:
Critics called out New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) this weekend for his view on the controversy surrounding top Donald Trump ally Elon Musk’s role in the president-elect’s second term. CNN’s Dana Bash asked Sununu ― whose previous flip-flopping on Trump now appears to have morphed into full-blown sycophancy — if he believed there was any conflict of interest with tech billionaire Musk’s proximity to Trump, given that Musk has “billions of dollars tied up in government contracts.”
It’s unclear whether the Republican governor had given this much thought ahead of the interview, but the line he came up with wasn’t exactly persuasive.
Referring to Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual, Sununu said, “The guy’s worth $450 billion as of today in this month so I don’t think he’s doing it for the money. He’s doing it for the bigger project and the bigger vision of America. He doesn’t need the dollars. He really doesn’t. So it’s not about, ‘If I get involved in this, I’ll get another little contract here or there.’ That’s nothing to him. So, I like the fact that he’s, in a way, he’s so rich, he’s so removed from the potential financial influence of it.”
As part of the same exchange, he also argued, “Everyone has a conflict of interest at some level.”
So let me see if I have this straight. According to the four-term governor of New Hampshire, Americans shouldn’t be overly concerned about the president-elect empowering a billionaire GOP megadonor with power and influence — a businessman with extensive private-sector interests here and abroad — and we should be indifferent to the potential for the megadonor’s conflicts of interest. Why? Because, according to Sununu, “everyone” has conflicts of interest, and the world’s wealthiest person isn’t overly concerned about making money. To be sure, the governor isn’t the only Republican who’s struggled with this question. Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, for example, was recently asked a similar question, and he responded by peddling discredited claims about Hunter Biden that didn’t make a lot of sense. But Sununu effectively shrugging his shoulders when asked about potential corruption was almost certainly worse. Richard Painter, the chief ethics attorney in the Bush/Cheney White House, saw the governor’s on-air comments and appeared unimpressed. “Is this the new normal?” Painter asked. “Billionaires are too rich to have conflicts of interest? Bull.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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