Dunleavy will leave Alaska if Trump offers a top job

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been fawning over Donald Trump for as long as he’s been governor.

Now he says, he looks forward to working with Trump “to make Alaska great again.”

We’ll soon see whether Dunleavy has said “Trump is the best” enough times and at sufficient volume to qualify for a top job in the second Trump administration.

Dunleavy checked out of the governor’s job long ago and dreams of abandoning Alaska to become the head of the Department of Energy of the Department of Interior.

There is no question he will be offered a job, but unless it’s high enough in the pecking order, Dunleavy won’t take it.

There is fierce competition for Trump’s favor and other loyal sycophants may have an edge because one of the tiebreakers in Trump world is that Dunleavy is taller than Trump.

Still, Trump has paid Dunleavy his highest compliment, calling him “all man” and the largest U.S. governor, as he did during a refueling stop at JBER on February 28, 2019.

“Look at that man. He’s all man. Look at him,” Trump said.

In 2022, campaigning in Anchorage against Sen. Lisa Murkowski,” Trump said, “We like Mike. A good man. I’ve been with him and he’s been with me from the beginning.”

For his part, Dunleavy has spent years trying to please Trump.

“Trust me, I’m not going to compare myself to Donald Trump. He’s shorter,” Dunleavy told Fairbanks Republicans in September 2019. “He’s got more money, too, by the way.”

He went on in a rambling 40-minute session to compare himself to Trump and praise him as a fellow victim of the swamp. He quoted Trump as saying, “Mike, I really like you and I really like Dan Sullivan.”

A few weeks later, Dunleavy told Breitbart News that he and Trump had both made the “fatal mistake” of not “kowtowing” to special interests.

“And so this is what you get when you fight on behalf of the average American, the average Alaskan,” he complained.

Part of the Trump audition process is to repeat Trump’s lies about “liquid gold,” as Dunleavy did in a Trump campaign piece that someone wrote for Dunleavy last month.

“We rank number one in the world for recoverable oil reserves, yet the Biden-Harris administration does not want the American people to benefit from what we have right under our feet,” Dunleavy said in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette October 23.

Saudi Arabia has the largest recoverable oil reserves. But Trump constantly repeats the lie that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge alone has more oil than Saudi Arabia and that it could produce enough money for the federal government to help pay down the national debt.

“Under the Trump administration we had become a net exporter of energy for the first time in 75 years because we allowed American hard work to do what it is capable of doing without the government getting in the way,” Dunleavy claimed.

Energy exports in 2023 were the highest on record.

Dunleavy sat in Trump’s box at the GOP convention one night last summer. He traveled to Texas to join a fundraiser co-hosted by billionaire Jeff Hildebrand, owner of Hilcorp, and he went to the Trump event just before the election in Madison Square Garden.

Only a governor dreaming of a new job behaves that way. And says he “wouldn’t rule out” taking the right federal job if it is offered.

Dunleavy’s departure, if it happens, would make Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom the next governor.

Republican supporters of Nick Begich pushed last summer for Dahlstrom to abandon her campaign for Congress and told her she had a shot at becoming governor if Trump won the election.

She abandoned her campaign for Congress after saying she had no intention of abandoning her campaign for Congress.

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