President Donald Trump says he told Florida Rep. Cory Mills to exit the Republican primary before his election defeat Tuesday but that the embattled lawmaker “wouldn’t listen.”
Mills, who was defeated by former local television news reporter Ryan Elijah on Tuesday night in Florida’s 7th District, was dogged by a litany of scandals, including a restraining order issued by a Florida judge last year after a former girlfriend accused him of threatening to reveal her sexually explicit videos.
Still, Trump endorsed him in February. But the president suggested on Truth Social on Wednesday that he was far from confident in the prospect of a Mills victory.
“I told Congressman Cory Mills of Florida, a friend of mine, to get out of the Race, but he wouldn’t listen,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He thought he could win, so who can blame him?”
The president immediately backed Elijah, whom he said “stands for EVERYTHING MAGA, and is respected by ALL.”
Mills isn’t the only Trump-backed Republican to see defeat in a GOP primary this summer. A slew of the president’s governor picks — including Mike Lindell in Minnesota and Randy Feenstra in Iowa — were bested by other candidates. So too were Reps. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) and Navy veteran Amir Hassan. Catalina Lauf, the president’s choice for Florida’s 19th congressional district, lost on Tuesday to media executive Jim Schwartzel.
It isn’t the first time Trump has distanced himself from a Republican after defeat.
Ogles, he said in a Truth Social post after the Tennessee primary, “was a person who I remained loyal to even though he had virtually no chance of winning.” And his opponent, former Tennessee Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher, was another “Great “Trump” Candidate,” the president wrote.
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