'His own worst enemy': Even Pat Boone doesn’t want Trump as a 2024 presidential candidate

29 November 2022

Pat Boone, now 88, went from being a major teen idol, pop star and actor during the 1950s and 1960s to being a far-right conspiracy theorist and an outspoken ally of the Christian Right and far-right White evangelical fundamentalists. The Jacksonville, Florida native supported former President Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, but now, following the 2022 midterms, Boone is hoping that Trump won’t be the GOP’s 2024 presidential nominee.

During an interview with the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove published on November 29, Boone said, “If Trump were to ask my advice, I would ask him not to run…. I don’t think there are enough Republicans who would vote for him so he could be elected. But he was his own worst enemy in his manner and his speech. And he made so many enemies that, while he could be a great president again if he muted his speech and all of that — which I’m not sure he’s capable of — I would advise him, ‘Please don’t run. I think you will divide the Republican Party even more.’ Sure, there are a few million people that will support him no matter what. But I think — because of the implacable, unmovable enemies he’s created, even in the Republican Party — that he would not be elected.”

On November 15, Trump officially announced that he is running for president again and is seeking the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. It was an announcement that some well-known Republicans who supported Trump in the past didn’t welcome. Clearly, author Ann Coulter, Fox News leader Rupert Murdoch and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would much rather have Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2024.

The fact that Boone wishes Trump would stay out of the 2024 presidential race doesn’t mean that he has moderated his political or religious views. Boone is not a Mainline Protestant; he is very much in the far-right evangelical camp, and he is still a big promoter of conspiracy theories — including the racist and thoroughly debunked “birther” theory, which claims that former President Barack Obama wasn’t really born in the United States but rather, Kenya, and isn’t a U.S. citizen. In fact, Obama’s birth certificate shows that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961 (two years after Hawaii obtained full statehood).

“In our chat…. (Boone) promoted the discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI identified Antifa operatives leading the January 6, 2021, insurrection — a bats**t assertion denied by no less than FBI Director Christopher Wray — and suggested Biden’s 2020 election victory benefited from voting machine ‘chicanery,’” Grove reports. “He told me that Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor George Soros — who, according to Federal Election Commission records, donated $128 million to Democrats running in the 2022 midterms — tried to subvert the midterms…. And more than six years after even birther-in-chief Donald Trump, at the height of his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, acknowledged that then-President Obama was born in the U.S., Boone continues to argue otherwise.”

Grove adds, “Boone told me he hasn’t changed his views since September 2011, when he claimed on camera, among other counterfactual assertions, that during a post-2008 election visit to Kenya, people kept telling him that the 44th president was born there, that Obama’s African grandmother admitted to having been present at Obama’s birth in Mombasa, and that the president’s long-form birth certificate — identifying his birthplace on August 4, 1961 as Honolulu’s Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital — was ‘a Photoshopped fraud.’”

Grove notes that Boone and his 66-year-old daughter, pop singer Debby Boone, have had major disagreements over gay rights. Debby Boone, best known for her hit 1977 adult contemporary ballad “You Light Up My Life,” has recorded Christian albums but has been openly critical of her father’s anti-gay rights positions and walked the red carpet at the 2014 GLAAD Media Awards.

Pat Boone told Grove, “She came out in a gay magazine and said she was ‘taught error’ growing up. So, I sat her down on this couch in this room and said, ‘Honey, you know I love you. You’re blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. I’ll love you till I die and beyond. I’ll do anything I can for you, but do you realize you’ve broken the Fifth Commandment?.... Honor your father and mother.’”

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