When Donald Trump first took the oath of office in 2017, former Republican Rep. Mark Sanford was about 50 yards away, not exactly sure what to think.
A few months before the election, Sanford had declared in a New York Times op-ed that he had no stomach for Trump’s “personal style and his penchant for regularly demeaning others.” But, for the good of the party, the MAGA skeptic endorsed the man who then stood before him.
For the next two years, Sanford — a libertarian-minded Freedom Caucus member — was a frequent Trump critic. Days after Trump took office, he said he heard from constituents that Trump’s travel ban was “moving from weird to reckless.” In the weeks after, he told Politico that Trump “represents the antithesis, or the undoing, of everything I thought I knew about politics, preparation and life.” In March of that year, he tried to sink Trump’s health care replacement for the Affordable Care Act.