My fellow Republicans:

I stand before you as a distant runner-up in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. I’m here to concede those losses to Donald Trump, but also to take a step back and refocus on what we’re in the process of doing as a political party, and as a country: we’re in the process of nominating the Republican Party’s candidate for election to the presidency of the United States of America.

Consider each of those elements: this is a process by which our our party will select our nominee for the presidency, a process that relies on individuals across this land voicing their preferences in the belief that, if enough of their fellow citizens feel the same way, those preferences will be honored.

But consider, please, what Donald Trump would do if he somehow failed to win the Republican Party’s nomination. Would he gracefully concede and throw his support behind the nominee? Or would he stalk off petulantly, declare that he’d been robbed, and start his own independent campaign? You know the answer.

You know the answer because you know that Donald Trump’s first allegiance isn’t to his party, or to his faith if he has one, or to his country — his first allegiance is to himself.

Consider, please, that the Republican nominee will run for the presidency, not of some two-bit college fraternity, not of some struggling real estate company, but of the United States of America, the de facto leader of what we used to call, proudly, the Free World, the world, inside our borders and across the globe, that believes in democracy as the finest experiment in human governance ever conceived, much less attempted. It’s a hallowed office, a position of grave responsibility and, most importantly, a position of service, where the interests of the many come far before the interests of the individual temporarily holding it.

What was astonishing about Trump getting elected in 2016 was not that he beat Hillary Clinton, who was one of the least appealing candidates imaginable, but that he had so few qualifications for the job. He’d never held public office of any kind.  I’m 25 years younger than him, and I was governor of South Carolina when he was still closing bankrupt casinos and ogling beauty pageant contestants in Russia. Even to those who voted for him, he represented not a tested leader, but a raised middle finger to the establishment.

What’s funny about that is, in fact, he IS the establishment — a product of inherited wealth who lives in a penthouse in New York City and in a country club in Florida, flies around in private planes, ran several real estate ventures into bankruptcy, has no discernible religious faith, is on his third wife, having openly cheated on his second, became famous by appearing in a TV show about firing people, and arrogantly declared that his followers would still love him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue (where, by the way, he lives). Before he ran for president of the United States, he was a tabloid joke in New York City — a place where tabloid jokes come cheap.

As president, he increased the national debt by a third, failed to build the Great Wall that he promised, cozied up to foreign tyrants, increased your cost of living with pointless tariffs, alienated our NATO allies, suggested we ingest cleaning fluid to ward off Covid, and, when a majority of our fellow citizens had had enough of him, declared — of course — that the election was stolen, and urged a mob to storm the capitol to stop his own vice president from doing the work of the people of this country.

He’ll tell you he was personally responsible for reversing Roe v. Wade, but back when he was a full-time New York liberal cheating on his wife, he was for abortion, and wouldn’t know a conservative justice from a golf caddy unless he was given a list.

This is a man MADE of the establishment, who has proved over and over that he believes he’s immune from the consequences of this actions. You may or may not think that the 91 felony counts against him are all politically motivated, but we had a saying when I was growing up in Bamberg, South Carolina: where there’s a large column of stinky black smoke, there might just be a dumpster fire.

Ask yourself: whose interests do you think Donald Trump really serves? You know the answer. You learned that answer on January 6, 2021. His first and only allegiance is to himself.

It isn’t just that he’s unfit for office; it’s that he was and is unqualified for it, and he proved that beyond doubt that January morning when duty called and he got in his limo and ran the other way.

In the end, I don’t care that I’ve lost to him. But I do care that all of you, the people of the great Republican Party and of this great nation, not lose to him again. It isn’t the mainstream media moguls or the urban elites who laugh at you at night in their beds. It’s that ultimate urban elite, that great pretender, Donald Trump. This time, laugh back. Laugh and walk away.

As I do now.