MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) says that the first presidential debate of the 2024 Republican presidential primary is really about who might be the party’s candidate in 2028 — not in the upcoming 2024 race.
“We’re going to have four years of President Donald Trump, and then eight years of one of these Republicans,” he said, praising the field of candidates but arguing that Trump already had the Republican nomination in the bag.
Waltz, the first Green Beret to serve in Congress, has endorsed Trump for president and is a Trump campaign surrogate. He spoke with Breitbart News before the debate — which the frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, chose not to attend.
“These are a lot of great leaders, conservative leaders,” Waltz said, “but they are running against Trump on the false premise that you can have all of Trump’s policies and agenda without him.”
He added: “I don’t believe you get everything he got done without a true disrupter in Washington”
Asked about what the legacy of the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol meant for Trump — a day before Trump was expected to hand himself in to authorities in Fulton County, Georgia, to face a state indictment there — Waltz said that he found it “disappointing” that there had not been a real investigation in Congress about the causes of the riot.
“Where did the pipe bombs come from [outside party headquarters]? What happened behind the security failures, where the D.C. National Guard was offered, but rejected? What happened to the intelligence that was passed on by the FBI, but not acted on by the Capitol Police?” Waltz asked.
These were questions, he said, that the January 6 Committee, under the Democrat-led House of Representatives, had refused to ask, but which still remained.
If he faulted Trump for anything, he said, it would only be the time it took him to act, but not for the riot itself.
Asked whether he thought Trump’s failure to achieve his objective on January 6 — a return of several states’ Electoral College votes to their respective legislatures for examination and reconsideration — was a failure of command leadership in a crises, Waltz said no.
‘There were real crises where he did show strong judgment – taking out [Iranian terror general Qasem] Soleimani while he was in Iraq, but before he was in Iran, with no collateral damage, before he could operationalize and kill Americans; pulling out of Syria, but leaving forces on top of the Kurds and the oil; listening to his advisers on Afghanistan instead of doing what Joe Biden did,” Waltz said.
Asked what he hoped to see on the debate stage, which he called an “audition for 2028,” Waltz said he was curious whether the candidates would try to burn bridges” with Trump supporters, or “lay out an agenda” that could appeal to Republican voters as a whole, now and in the future.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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