Republican Gov. Larry Hogan says backing Trump in 2024 is 'definition of insanity'

Larry Hogan, the 65-year-old Republican governor of the blue state of Maryland and potential 2024 presidential candidate, warned his party against embracing former President Donald Trump again in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Tuesday.

“We won’t win back the White House by nominating Donald Trump or a cheap impersonation of him,” Hogan said.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

The Maryland governor made the comments at a speaker series hosted at the California library about the future of the GOP after losing the White House and both houses of Congress under Trump.

Named after Ronald Reagan’s famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” invited speakers are asked to address “fundamental questions” like “Why are you are Republican?,” “What should the Republican Party stand for?,” and “How as a party are we succeeding? How are we failing?”

“A party that lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections and that couldn’t even beat Joe Biden is desperately in need of course correction,” Hogan said, blasting his own party’s new direction under Trump.

“The truth is the last election was not rigged and it wasn’t stolen. We simply didn’t offer the majority of voters what they were looking for.”

Hogan is a rare Republican governor of Democrat-leaning Maryland, but maintains high approval ratings despite high inflation (65% as of March). He cannot run again in 2022 due to term limits.

“As Ronald Reagan understood, successful politics is really about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division,” he said of Reagan, who was also a GOP governor of a Democrat-leaning state.

“We have been doing far too much subtracting and dividing.”

The Maryland governor has been eyed as a potential challenger to Trump in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. As a former businessman, Hogan told The Wall Street Journal that he did not have many policy disagreements with Trump.

“I just thought Trump was his own worst enemy and picked fights and turned people off unnecessarily and really wasn’t that successful at getting anything done,” he said.

The Reagan Library speaker series has drawn many other presidential hopefuls since its launch last year, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott.