Will Hurd, a former Texas congressman who was part of a dwindling bloc of Republican moderates in the House and was the only black member of his caucus when he left office in 2021, announced his candidacy for president on Thursday with a video message who attacked the GOP frontrunner, Donald J. Trump.
“If we nominate a lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump, who lost the House, Senate and White House, we all know that Joe Biden will win again,” he said, referring to Republican losses in the midterm elections of 2018 and 2022. elections, in addition to Mr. Trump’s own defeat in 2020.
Mr. Hurd, 45, represented the 23rd district for three terms before deciding not to run for reelection in 2020 when a large number of GOP moderates in Congress chose to retire rather than run for office led by President Trump.
His district was larger than some states, stretching from El Paso to San Antonio along the southwestern border.
Mr. Hurd, who also appeared on CBS Mornings, stressed in his video that Republicans needed to nominate a forward-looking candidate who could unite the party and the country.
“I will give us the common sense leadership that America so desperately needs,” he said.
A formidable gauntlet awaits Mr. Hurd, a highly anticipated candidate in a crowded GOP presidential field. To qualify for the first party debate in August, candidates must have at least 1 percent support in multiple national polls recognized by the Republican National Committee. There are also fundraising thresholds, including a minimum of 40,000 unique donors for individual campaigns.
Before entering politics, Mr. Hurd was an undercover agent for the CIA, and his ten-year tenure with the agency included work in Afghanistan.
In Congress, he developed a reputation for working the aisle, drawing attention in 2017 when he carpooled from Texas to Washington with Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat and House colleague.
While Mr. Hurd largely followed the Republican line, he was also known to oppose Mr. Trump. During his last term in the House, Mr. Hurd voted against Mr. Trump’s views more than a third of the time.
Mr Hurd has been a particularly fierce critic of the president’s push to build a wall along the entire southern border, a cause célèbre for Mr Trump he embarked on in 2016. Trump’s border wall initiative is a “third-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”
It was not the first time Mr. Hurd has spoken so bluntly against a part of Mr. Trump’s agenda.
When Mr. Trump signed an executive order in January 2017 barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, one of the first acts of his presidency, Mr. Hurd denounced it, saying the policy would “affect the lives of thousands of American men and women in our military, diplomatic corps and intelligence agencies.”
And when Mr. Trump attacked four first-year Democratic congresswomen of color in 2019, Mr. Hurd berated the president and criticized the direction of the Republican Party.
“The party is not growing in some of the largest parts of our country,” he said in a June 2019 speech to the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBTQ group. “Why is that? I’ll tell you.”
“Don’t be a racist,” Mr. Hurd continued, according to The Washington Blade. ‘Don’t be a misogynist, okay? Don’t be a homophobe. These are really basic things we should all learn when we were in kindergarten.”
But while Mr. Hurd broke with Mr. Trump on a number of notable occasions, he also appalled Trump’s critics when he first voted with House Republicans against impeachment of Mr. Trump in December 2019. party-line vote by the House for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but acquitted by the Senate.
