At GOP event, Trump gets called out

In Las Vegas, some potential 2024 candidates look to keep mantle away from ex-president

At an influential Republican event in Las Vegas over the weekend, Donald Trump's name came up frequently, but not always with the political respect he once was accustomed to.

Party donors and fundraisers gathered to size up potential 2024 presidential contenders, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Vice-President Mike Pence.

But Trump absorbed criticism from other prominent Republicans on Saturday about who should be the GOP standard-bearer.

"We have to have this discussion out in the open," said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie at the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) meeting Saturday. "We have to have this family argument. And we need to have it now."

Christie, who led Trump's White House transition team in 2016 after running against him in the primaries that year, said he ultimately expects seven or eight major candidates to enter the race, "which is manageable", compared with the 16 who ran against Trump in 2016.

"A lot of those people are fishing out of the Trump pond," Christie said, suggesting that prospects such as DeSantis and Mike Pompeo are "MAGA guys" who would steal support from Trump's base in a way that creates opportunities for others — like him.

"We should all rally behind someone? OK, who? I don't think there's any obvious choice," Christie said.

Pompeo, Trump's former secretary of state, who is also considering a White House run, took an apparent swipe at Trump but did not mention him by name.

Pompeo said conservatives deserve leaders "who fight for them, not ourselves or our own egos".

Trump addressed the gathering via video, saying, "We have to stay strong and we have to fight, and frankly, you better hope a certain person wins the election in 2024." He did receive some cheers and standing ovations in the crowded hotel ballroom.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, in an interview with The Washington Post, said: "People want to move on, there's no doubt about that. He'll (Trump) have to fight for it (the nomination) like everybody else."

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who is considering a 2024 run, said: "Trump needs to be tested. People need to go out there and be willing to stand up to him."

The man who could pose the largest threat is DeSantis, also received a warm response as the final featured speaker on Saturday night.

"We have a lot more to do, and I have only begun to fight," DeSantis told the crowd without elaborating on his future plans.

He talked up his resounding re-election win earlier this month, where he beat his Democratic opponent by almost 20 points, arguing he can pull in nontraditional Republican voters.

But DeSantis made no mention of Trump.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has restored Trump's access to the social media platform that helped power his rise to the presidency in 2016 and served as his main cudgel to bludgeon opponents. Trump has 86.5 million followers on Twitter, but his most recent tweet in somewhat of a reopened time capsule, was on Jan 8, 2021.

Musk based his decision to restore Trump via a Twitter poll. Of the 15,085,458 votes cast, Trump got 51.8 percent in favor of his restoration.

"The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei," Musk tweeted Saturday evening.

Former New Hampshire GOP Chair Jennifer Horn, who led the state party in 2016, said the growing number of likely 2024 candidates "should know better" this time around.

"They are feeding exactly the kind of environment that Trump needs to win," Horn said to CBS News. "If past is prologue, we've all got reason to be concerned."

Pence treaded carefully at the RJC event, talking up the accomplishments of the Trump administration but avoiding direct criticism of his former boss.

But in an interview with NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Pence said Trump got bad advice from lawyers around the days leading up to the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

He said that Trump's administration hit a "new low" when attorney Justin Clark told Trump in the Oval Office that lawsuits filed to challenge election results in different states were likely to be unsuccessful.

"Things got very heated," Pence said. "There was shouting, there was yelling. But in the aftermath of that meeting, the president made the decision to replace his capable campaign lawyers with this widening circle of outside attorneys, who ultimately led him to the conclusion that I had the authority to overturn the election, which was demonstrably and historically false."

But when asked on Sunday if he thinks Trump committed a crime in connection with the Capitol attack, Pence replied: "I don't know if it is criminal to listen to bad advice from lawyers."

On the Aug 8 search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, Pence suggested that federal authorities did not exhaust all methods to recover documents, adding that, "There had to be many other ways to resolve those issues."

Agencies contributed to this story.