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Dozens of former Trump Cabinet officials won’t publicly support his 2024 reelection bid

by Lauren Sforza - 07/30/23 4:12 PM ET

Dozens of former Cabinet officials under former President Trump’s administration declined to publicly support the former president’s third bid for the White House, NBC News reported.

NBC News reached out to 44 people who previously served in Trump’s Cabinet during his four years in office to gauge whether they would support the former president during the 2024 presidential election. The outlet reported that most of the people declined to comment or ignored the requests and that only four said publicly they would support Trump for the presidency.

Trump’s Cabinet saw a higher rate of turnover compared with many of his predecessors, with many new officials rotating in and out of his administration over the four years. The only four former Cabinet members who NBC News reached out to who said they would support Trump are former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought and former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell.

A spokesperson for Meadows told NBC News that he “fully” supports Trump. In May, Vought posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that the former president is “the only person I trust to take a wrecking ball to the Deep State.”

Other former administration officials were reluctant to support Trump or have publicly said they will not support him. Former Attorney General Bill Barr told NBC News that he opposes Trump getting the 2024 GOP nomination but declined whether to say he would support him in the general election if pitted against President Biden.

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Former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney also said that he does not want Trump to get the Republican nomination for president.

“I am working hard to make sure that someone else is the nominee,” Mulvaney told NBC News. “I think he’s the Republican who is most likely to lose in a general election, of all our leading candidates. If anyone can lose to Joe Biden, it would be him.”

Other former officials who have not endorsed Trump yet include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, former chief of staff John Kelly and Joseph Maguire and Dan Coats, who each once served as director of national intelligence. Coats told NBC News that he would be supporting former Vice President Mike Pence for the GOP primary.

The Hill has reached out to Trump’s campaign for comment.