Key parts of President Donald Trump’s agenda are driving a wedge between him and some Republican governors, even as the president maintains overwhelming support from his party’s top state leaders.
A handful of Republican governors who traveled to Washington for the National Governors Association’s Winter Meeting this week doubled down on their disagreements with the president over central agenda items, like immigration and the White House’s redistricting push.
“I just think it’s a great opportunity for President Trump to do something that nobody’s been able to do since Ronald Reagan, and that is to come up with a legal immigration policy that keeps people working, keeps our economy moving,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Thursday at the Politico Governors Summit.
The governor, whose home state has a large population of Haitian immigrants, said that “removing” Temporary Protected Status for Haitians — a move championed by the administration since last summer — would be a “mistake.”
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“What they’re doing is they’re filling jobs that were not being filled,” DeWine said of the Haitian population in Springfield, which Trump baselessly accused of eating pets in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign.
Immigration wasn’t the only issue that showed lines of division within the party. The president’s push around redistricting, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s legal threats if states attempted to regulate prediction markets also came up.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox also recently criticized Trump over the CFTC’s efforts to limit state regulation on prediction markets, a disagreement that continued to play out during his visit to Washington this week.
“Let me be clear, I will use every resource within my disposal as governor of the sovereign state of Utah, and under the Constitution of the United States to beat you in court,” Cox said on X this week, in response to CFTC’s chair Mike Selig’s announcement that the commission had “exclusive jurisdiction” over derivative markets. Selig also said that those who sought to challenge its authority in the states would face litigation.
“This is gambling, and gambling is illegal in our state,” Cox later added at the Politico event, in response to a question about the online post.
The national redistricting battle started at the request of Trump to try to keep his Republican majorities in place in this year’s midterms and is still playing out across the country. Cox was one of at least two Republican governors to express regret over it.
“Let me just state that I hate all of the midterm redistricting. I hate all of it. I think it’s a terrible idea. I wish we weren’t doing it. I think it’s a mistake,” Cox said on Wednesday at the America at 250 Forum hosted by the Pew Charitable Trust.
Asked at the same event by the host if Oklahoma was considering redrawing congressional lines to “go from all red districts to all red districts,” Gov. Kevin Stitt, the chair of the NGA, laughed and explained that states can’t depend on who leads the White House to provide solutions for their residents.
“I don’t think the American people like this. We don’t want to see a blue state do it. We don’t see a red state do it. It’s just weird. It doesn’t pass the smell test. We shouldn’t be doing it,” Stitt said.
Stitt, who has a longstanding feud with the president, publicly opposed Trump’s decision to exclude the Democratic governors of Maryland and Colorado from a bipartisan dinner at the White House. It led to Stitt withdrawing the NGA branding from the event. He wrote a letter stating that if the event was not inclusive of all governors, it would no longer serve “as the facilitator for that event.” The president called him a “RINO,” or Republican in Name Only.
The governors willing to air their disagreements remain in the minority — though they touched on issues that have seen shifts in public opinion, even from Republicans.
The vast majority of attendees, however, sounded much more like Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, chair of the Republican Governors Association, who expressed the organization’s unwavering support for Trump.
“President Trump has had unprecedented successes in his first year back in The White House,” Gianforte said in a statement after Republican and Democratic governors met with the president for breakfast on Friday. “Republican governors will continue to work with each other and with President Donald J. Trump to keep delivering for the American people.”
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