Washington Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican and outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, wrote in Ronald Reagan for president when he cast his 2020 ballot.
“I know it’s simply symbolic. It’s not going to change the outcome in my state. But I thought it was important to just cast a vote that showed the kind of person I’d like to see in office,” Hogan told The Washington Post in an interview released Friday.
The vote makes Hogan one of the highest-profile Republicans who is not supporting Trump for reelection, though his decision to not back Democratic nominee Joe Biden could be seen as a way for him to refocus attention on his ongoing criticism of Trump and maintain standing in the Republican Party in case he decides to continue his political career beyond his current term in office.
The Maryland governor, a moderate Republican speculated to be considering a 2024 presidential bid, has long been critical of Trump, and the pandemic has exacerbated the tension between them.
In April 2020, he penned a scathing op-ed in The Washington Post calling out the administration’s “bungled” early testing efforts.
“It was hopeless, waiting around for him (Trump). Governors were being told that we were on our own. It was sink or swim. And if I didn’t do something dramatic, we simply would not come close to having enough tests in Maryland,” he wrote, outlining his own efforts to procure desperately needed testing supplies from South Korea via a plea from his wife, Yumi Hogan.
Trump fired back at the time, asserting that Hogan “didn’t understand too much about what was going on.”
He drew the administration’s ire in a book published over the summer further lambasting the federal coronavirus response, to which White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany criticized his “revisionist history” during a press briefing.
Hogan previously obliquely criticized Trump and Washington partisanship during his second inaugural address in January 2019.
“Let’s repudiate the debilitating politics practiced elsewhere — including just down the road in Washington — where insults substitute for debate, recriminations for negotiation, and gridlock for compromise; where the heat, finger-pointing and rancor suffocates the light, and the only result is divisiveness and dysfunction,” he said. “Most of us are sick and tired of all that drama.”
And he spoke out amid the 2019 government shutdown.
“It’s absurd and ridiculous, and every single person in Washington is to blame,” Hogan said, according to CNN affiliate WBAL. “It’s, like, it’s crazy. It’s ‘If I don’t get my wall, I’m going to shut down the government.’ And, ‘If you don’t open the government, you can’t speak in our chamber.’ It’s a bunch of 2-year-olds, you know?”
