Within 24 hours of Donald Trump riding down that golden escalator into the heart of America’s political consciousness, Larry Elder once recalled, he had the reality TV star pegged as the next president. He urged his radio audience: “We ought to get behind him.”
Two years into the Trump presidency, Elder sounded rhapsodic about the choice he and other Americans made. “The election of Donald Trump in 2016, in my opinion, was divine intervention,” he told an audience of conservatives gathered at a Rancho Palos Verdes resort in 2019. “It was a miracle. He is almost God-sent.”
Elder sounds decidedly more guarded about Trump these days, as the longtime Los Angeles radio host leads 45 other challengers in the race to replace Gavin Newsom, should Californians vote to recall the governor on Sept. 14.
Elder has taken pains to talk about all the other Republican presidential candidates he supported before Trump. When The Times asked to talk to him about Trump, his campaign spokeswoman recommended a focus on Elder’s “prominent Democratic or independent supporters.” And Elder told CNN recently that he’s “indifferent” on the prospect of receiving an endorsement from Trump, who remains immensely popular among Republicans nationally.
Elder has been walking what one conservative commentator called a “tightrope” — balancing the imperatives of many of the most passionate recall proponents, who love Trump, while also trying to hew to more centrist ground in a state where Democrats and nonpartisan voters dominate.
The internet commentator Allah Pundit theorized that the Republican frontrunner is “getting a crash course on the agonizing dilemma every Republican running for office has faced since 2016, when a decisive chunk of the party’s base went full-cultist for Trump.”
Elder “wants to present himself as a generic Republican and would-be statesman, not the sort of fire-breathing Trumpist whom Californians would recoil from,” the blogger wrote.
Newsom defenders would like to tie Elder as closely as possible to Trump, a deeply unpopular figure for the majority of Californians. The former president lost California to Joe Biden by nearly 30 percentage points in the 2020 election.
One anti-recall campaign mailer featured no fewer than five pictures of Trump. A TV spot shows a picture of a smiling Elder and Trump side by side and urges voters to “stop the Republican recall.”
With a little more than a week before the election, there has been no indication that the former president will take a position on getting rid of Newsom, or lend support to any of the would-be replacements. And Elder’s campaign said the recall is “not about Trump,” whom the candidate has not spoken to since the start of the campaign, while he “is focused on California, not national politics.”
In his pre-recall days, Elder gave one of his most extended descriptions of how he became a Trump fan at a 2019 retreat for the David Horowitz Freedom…
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