Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), who lost his primary election last week, said on Sunday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her Democratic colleagues are hoping that former President Trump announces another run for president in 2024 ahead of this year’s midterm elections because they think it’ll deflect from President Biden’s poor approval ratings.
During an appearance on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” moderator Margaret Brennan played Meijer a clip from Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) latest campaign commercial where her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, referred to Trump as a “threat to our republic” and a “coward.”
In response, Meijer told Brennan that Trump’s continuing influence on the party is due to “the extremes on the right, and the establishment left.”
“Nancy Pelosi, I think she’s waking up every day crossing her fingers that Donald Trump runs in 2024, that he announces well ahead of the midterms, because right now, the midterms are set to be a referendum on President Biden’s leadership and Speaker Pelosi and many of my House Democratic colleagues do not want that,” Meijer said. “They want it to be a referendum on former President Trump and I think former President Trump wants that as well.”
Meijer, who was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his role in the Jan 6, 2021 attack at the Capitol, lost his reelection bid on Tuesday, being defeated by opponent John Gibbs (R), who had been endorsed by Trump.
Meijer, who recently said that he has no regrets following his primary defeat to Gibbs, told Brennan that Pelosi, along with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) played a role in him losing his congressional seat, noting how the committee spent half a million dollars to boost his opponent’s profile.
“So we had a scenario where not only did I have the former president aligned against me, but in a rare showing of bipartisan unity, Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic Campaign Committee, also united to try to knock me off the ballot. Now, this just highlights the cynicism and hypocrisy of our politics today,” Meijer told Brennan.
“And frankly, it’ll be unknowable what that ultimate impact was, but the fact that we have the establishment left and the extreme right locking arms in common cause paints a very telling picture of where our politics are in 2022.”