Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican critic of former President Donald Trump, said he’s entering the 2024 presidential race.
(Bloomberg) — Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican critic of former President Donald Trump, said he’s entering the 2024 presidential race.
Hutchinson, 72, said in an ABC News interview broadcast Sunday that while he’ll make a formal announcement later this month in Arkansas, he’s going to run for the Republican presidential nomination.
“As I’ve traveled the country for six months, I hear people talk about the leadership of our country, and I’m convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts,” Hutchinson said on ABC.
Hutchinson is the fourth candidate to challenge Trump for the GOP nomination, joining former South Carolina Governor and Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Michigan businessman Perry Johnson. Other candidates including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are also expected to run.
His announcement comes as Trump is scheduled to be arraigned on Tuesday in Manhattan after being the first former US president to be indicted. He’s due to face charges related to a hush-money payment to an adult film star during the 2016 presidential election.
Hutchinson said he thinks Trump, who has said he’s innocent and the victim of a political prosecution, should drop out of the race because the office is more important than any individual and that his criminal case is “too much of a sideshow” and distraction.
“If we’re looking at the presidency and the future of our country, then we don’t need that distraction and he needs to be able to concentrate on the legal issues that he faces,” Hutchinson said on ABC.
Hutchinson, a former US representative, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration and Department of Homeland Security official, served eight years as Arkansas governor before leaving office at the beginning of 2023 because of term limits.
He spent his final day as governor in Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucuses.
Hutchinson, who faces a long shot bid for the nomination, is seeking to appeal to GOP voters with a unity message. He has cast himself as a pragmatic conservative with the experience to lead the party in a different way than Trump — whom he has portrayed as rising to power by dividing people.
“We are divided, but leaders have to try to bring people together, particularly on key issues,” Hutchinson said in a Feb. 8 interview on Bloomberg Radio. “And that’s where I think it’s responsibility of a president to try to appeal to the best instincts of America and not our worst instincts.”
Hutchinson has also spoken about the need to bridge the growing divide between rural America and urban areas in the US.
Hutchinson grew up on a small farm in Gravette and practiced law in rural Arkansas for 21 years. At 31, he was appointed as a US attorney by President Ronald Reagan, the youngest in the nation at the time. He touts a record fighting domestic terrorism and violent crime, including donning a bulletproof vest and helping arrest a neo-Nazi leader after a three-day armed standoff in 1985.
In 1996, Hutchinson first won election to the US House. During his third term, then-President George W. Bush appointed him head of the DEA and later as an undersecretary in the newly created Department of Homeland Security. He was elected governor in 2014 and reelected with 65% of the vote in 2018.
–With assistance from Mark Niquette.
(Updates with additional Hutchinson comments starting in second paragraph.)
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