Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday he’d back Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election.
The former 2016 Republican presidential candidate said Wednesday in an interview on “The View” that Clinton’s take on the role of the government is irreconcilable with his own.
So if it comes down to Trump versus Clinton in the general election in November, he explained, he’d support the billionaire businessman.
“I will. I will, at the end of the day, I will [support Trump],” Perry said Wednesday in a panel discussion on the View.
“Senator Clinton has a different philosophical view than I do about what government’s role is,” he added. “She believes the government and Washington, D.C., needs to be even strengthened more and more power put into Washington, D.C., I disagree with that and I disagree with it powerfully.”
Perry’s remarks this week stand in sharp contrast to when he said last year that Trump’s candidacy was a “cancer on conservatism,” the Daily Caller’s Kaitlan Collins noted.
The former governor also said at the time that Trump’s brand of “conservatism” must be “clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.”
But with the prospect of the general election becoming a match between Trump and Clinton, Perry said he’d go for the candidate with whom he has fewer ideological disagreements.
The former Texas governor has endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the 2016 GOP primary.
