Former Bridgewater Associates Chief Executive Officer David McCormick’s new book opens at a low point in his failed US Senate bid, with Donald Trump excoriating him as a “liberal Wall Street Republican” during a rally for the eventual GOP nominee in the race, celebrity physician Mehmet Oz.
(Bloomberg) — Former Bridgewater Associates Chief Executive Officer David McCormick’s new book opens at a low point in his failed US Senate bid, with Donald Trump excoriating him as a “liberal Wall Street Republican” during a rally for the eventual GOP nominee in the race, celebrity physician Mehmet Oz.
McCormick would lose the Pennsylvania Senate GOP primary by just 951 votes to the Trump-backed Oz, who fell short in the general election against Democrat John Fetterman.
McCormick, 57, is now weighing another run in 2024 for Democratic Senator Bob Casey’s seat. And while he says he doesn’t blame Trump for his loss last time, his brush with the former president and the tensions between traditional conservatives and the populist views now dominant in the GOP are at the center of his new book, “Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America,” released Tuesday.
“It reflects this debate in the conservative movement about where to take the country,” McCormick said in a Monday interview with Bloomberg News. “What I’m trying to say in the book is there’s real merit in the angry part of our population, many of them Republicans, who think that people haven’t been paying attention, the system’s not working.”
In his book, McCormick says that when he heard Trump was going to endorse Oz, he flew to the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to ask him to stay out of the race. But there, Trump played video of a 2021 interview where McCormick said Trump bore some responsibility for the polarization in the US and wished President Joe Biden well.
Trump was unhappy with those comments and told him he couldn’t win unless he said the 2020 election was stolen. “I made it clear to him that I couldn’t do that,” he says in the book — even though McCormick refused to answer whether the election was stolen in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview during last year’s primary.
McCormick said he was surprised by Trump’s attacks because he supported many of his policies and interviewed to be his Treasury secretary, and his wife, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Dina Powell McCormick, served as his deputy national security adviser.
McCormick said Trump was making the point that the old Republican Party was dead.
Winning Elections
In an interview with David Westin on Bloomberg Television on Tuesday, McCormick was asked whether the GOP’s push to deregulate contributed to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The ex-Bridgewater chief blamed macroeconomic factors, mismanagement of the bank and a lack of appropriate oversight by the San Francisco Federal Reserve.
“In this case, it wasn’t the lack of regulation, it was the lack of oversight,” he said. “On balance, the government’s been far too prone to be proactive with regulation and far too, not eager enough, I guess, to roll back regulation.”
McCormick’s book weaves in his personal story growing up in northeastern Pennsylvania, attending West Point and serving in the Gulf War and the George W. Bush administration, before going on to run the world’s largest hedge fund.
It casts the US as sclerotic and threatened by an ascendant China. But McCormick says the US can be renewed with an agenda that bridges the GOP’s traditional conservative principles with its populist and isolationist impulses — with the right leadership.
“President Trump had his moment as the great disruptor, but what matters now — when the present and future of America are in such jeopardy — is what we do next,” McCormick writes. “To save our republic, we need a vision for how we will address the immense problems before us, and we need leaders who can unite our country around that vision.”
The party needs candidates who can win, McCormick said in the interview, and he believes he would have defeated Fetterman, who won despite suffering a stroke that sidelined him during the campaign. Oz was one of several Trump-endorsed candidates who lost what Republicans considered winnable races, costing them the Senate.
“If you believe that conservative ideas will take the country in the right direction, if you believe that progressive ideas — or some of them at least — are taking the country in the wrong direction, then to change the direction of the country, you need to win elections,” he said.
Next Campaign
McCormick said he doesn’t have a timetable for deciding whether to run in 2024, but he has been laying the groundwork for a campaign.
Republicans see 2024 as a more promising year with Democrats having to defend more Senate seats, including that of Casey. The senator hasn’t said whether he’ll seek reelection after announcing in January he was having surgery for prostate cancer and expected to make a full recovery.
Veteran Pennsylvania Republican strategist John Brabender said he believes if McCormick runs, it would essentially clear the GOP field except for maybe a “nuisance candidate” because party leaders this time would coalesce around someone they think can win.
“I think they feel like, ‘Look, what we don’t want to do is have some big inter-party fight,’” Brabender said. “We have a great candidate who checks all the boxes.”
But the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a pamphlet on Monday rehashing attacks McCormick faced last year that he was trying to reinvent himself as a Trump stalwart while hiding his ties to China and Wall Street.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.