A Trumper, but 'Trumped out'
He was one of the few elders of the traditional Republican establishment to endorse Donald Trump in 2016 and the only former presidential nominee to attend the convention that nominated Trump. I
n a split with the 45th president, Dole said there's no question that Trump lost his reelection race in 2020 – narrowly perhaps but fair and square.
"He lost the election, and I regret that he did, but they did," Dole said. "He had Rudy Giuliani running all over the country, claiming fraud. He never had one bit of fraud in all those lawsuits he filed and statements he made."
"I'm a Trumper," Dole said at one point during the conversation. But he added at another, "I'm sort of Trumped out, though."
When Dole's cancer diagnosis was announced in February, President Joe Biden dropped by the apartment to visit, bringing several of his grandchildren and staying for an hour and a half. The two men served together in the Senate for nearly 24 years – Biden as a Democrat from Delaware, Dole as a Republican from Kansas.
"A great, kind, upstanding, decent person," Dole said of Biden. Even so, he said the new president is leaning too far left these days, and he chided Biden about the Keystone Pipeline. “I asked him, I said, ‘Why did you close that pipeline in (South) Dakota?’”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/22/98-bob-dole-reckons-legacy-trump-ponders-future-gop/7995412002/