Wisconsin Speaker Vos: Trump Is ‘the One Person That Joe Biden Can Beat’

Wisconsin assembly speaker Robin Vos (R.) told reporters on Friday that Donald Trump is “the one person that Joe Biden can beat” in the 2024 presidential election.

Vos’s full comments from the video by Milwaukee CBS reporter A.J. Bayatpour:

But I don’t want to nominate people who can’t win. I do not want to nominate losers. And that is exactly what I believe will occur if Donald Trump is the nominee. We know how this is going to end. I said to one of my colleagues the other day, “I imagine, at the time, if the captain of the Titanic could go back six hours ahead of time, and warn himself, like, ‘Hey, this isn’t going to work out well,’ he would have probably adjusted the ship.” Well, we have that chance now as Republicans, to look and say, we know what’s happening, we know how this is going to end, we can turn the course and pick somebody else, and probably win because Joe Biden is incredibly inept and unbelievably weak. There’s only, in my mind, one person that he could . . . beat, and that’s Donald Trump. Why would Republicans pick the one person that Joe Biden can beat? That is stupid. So, my hope is that we go through a vigorous primary process where we look and say, hey, Nikki Haley, Glenn Youngkin, Ron DeSantis, you know, the whole wide raft of people, which one is the most articulate spokesperson to take on Joe Biden, and we don’t somehow discount all those people because one very loud person wants another chance to lose. That is not what I want as a Republican.

Vos has been speaker of the assembly, the lower house of Wisconsin’s legislature, since 2013. He has been an effective conservative leader, villainized by the Left, but also by Trump.

Vos had authorized an investigation into irregularities in the 2020 Wisconsin elections, which turned into a waste of time and money as it turned up nothing and kept the issue at the center of state politics for no reason. Vos himself never endorsed the stolen-election theory and testified to the January 6 committee that he repeatedly told Trump that his demands for decertification were unconstitutional.

In response, Trump endorsed a primary challenger in Vos’s assembly district in 2022. Vos defeated him and then fired the head of the elections investigation. Trump endorsed the primary challenger as a write-in candidate in the general election. Vos defeated him again and then removed the Republican chairwoman of the assembly’s elections committee, who had lost the trust of other legislators by obsessing over the 2020 election.

Robin Vos is showing Republicans one way to get out of Trump’s grasp. He hasn’t moderated in his policy views and remains a steadfast conservative. Instead, he has focused on his duties to his party (foremost among them, to win elections), the assembly, and the state and federal constitutions. And he’s been sounding the alarm, repeatedly, about Trump’s weakness as a general-election candidate. Republicans should listen to Vos, a winner.