Mark Sanford, the longest of long-shot presidential candidates, insists that he can convince Republican primary voters that the ballooning national debt matters and that President Trump has fallen down on the job of reining it in.
Sanford, a former South Carolina governor who also spent two stints in the House of Representatives, announced Sunday that he will challenge Trump for the GOP nomination.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, he said Trump had jettisoned the GOP’s traditional fidelity to fiscal discipline, making party leaders no better stewards of the federal purse than liberal Democrats. Under Trump, the deficit has increased to $1 trillion, and the debt to $22 trillion, even amid continued economic expansion. The escalating debt under President Barack Obama was one of the key issues that led to the Tea Party sweeping away Democratic seats in the 2010 midterms, delivering the House to Republicans.
Sanford, 59, was a rising GOP star in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But he cratered his promising career by abandoning his official duties and disappearing from South Carolina to engage in an extra-marital affair with a woman from Argentina. His excuse that he had been absent from South Carolina “hiking the Appalachian Trail” — in fact, he was seeing his mistress Maria Belen Chapur — made him an enduring punchline.
Running for president will resurrect discussion of Sanford’s personal foibles, especially if the Trump campaign feels in any way threatened. Sanford said he was undaunted.
“I’ve discussed it ad nauseum here at home,” Sanford said. “The people that [know me] best said: ‘Look, we don’t approve, or like how you handled [that]. But we know you, we trust you, we believe in you, and we’ll send you back to Congress to represent us.’ That’s a rather amazing personal journey to go on. And, it’s a very humbling journey. And so if and when that comes up, I would talk about the lessons learned.”
Sanford was ousted from his Charleston-area congressional seat last year after losing his bid for renomination to a Trump-backed primary challenger. He had taken issue with the president’s sharp rhetoric and unorthodox positions on key issues such as trade, common criticisms among “Never Trump” Republicans. Trump responded by urging Republicans in South Carolina’s First District to sack him. They complied.
Sanford, the father of four sons, divorced his wife Jenny and later broke off his engagement with Chapur via Facebook. Jenny Sanford wrote a book about the saga and remarried last year.
Concerns about the president’s ritual trashing of venerated American institutions, such as the Federal Reserve, is also motivating Sanford to run against Trump.
“When you say that [Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell] is an enemy of the state; when you say, with all due respect to the media, that they’re the enemy of state — when you say you trust certain despots more than you trust your intel agencies, I mean what that begins to do is add to the skepticism that’s already in place with regard to the institutional framework of our government,” Sanford said.
Intimating that he is under no illusion that he has a slim chance of winning, Sanford suggested his challenge would help Trump in the general election in November 2020.
“A contest of ideas, a challenge to where we are on debt, spending, and a few other themes, would make the party stronger would make the nominee stronger,” Sanford said. “If we don’t have a debate as Republicans about some of these themes and we just sort of go as-is into the November election, I think that we’re looking at awfully tough electoral consequences.”
