Stewart: “We are going to get endorsed by President Trump.”

Erin Stewart told members of the Republican State Central Committee Thursday night, “We are going to get endorsed by President Trump,” according to a recording obtained by Daily Ructions. The announcement came two-thirds through the New Britain mayor’s 14 minute speech. Stewart immediately struck a defensive note after announcing the Trump endorsement “is going to be great.” She added she will not “allow the left into thinking, believing that is a bad thing for us. That that is going to lead to us not being able to be successful.”

The Republican frontrunner, Stewart is exploring a candidacy for the party’s nomination for governor. It’s been a big month for the six-term mayor, though not one of uninterrupted high points. She announced earlier this week that she has raised $130,000 in her first fundraising report. That puts Stewart more than a third of the way to the $350,000 she will need to qualify for the state’s public campaign financing bonanza.

In pursuit of that Trump endorsement, Stewart defended and hailed the Republican president’s calamitous and incoherent mess of tariff increases. She will struggle to explain how supporting inflationary tariffs advances her to-be-formulated plan to reduce the cost of living in Connecticut, a state that imports parts and exports complex finished products.

Stewart highlighted her trip to the White House this week to witness and add her endorsement to Trump’s executive order making it easier to mine and burn coal, a head-scratcher of a plan in a state that spent decades getting rid of coal to make the air cleaner. Any feint toward “clean coal” will quickly crumble in a rendezvous with reality. Stewart’s trip to the White House this week was not without a disappointment. She told the party committee that she had spent Valentine’s Day in 2018 at the White House with Trump, bringing along her Make America Great Again hat with her for the president to sign. She left Washington five years ago without her hat and hoped to retrieve it this week with a signature, but Trump “didn’t give a shit.”

“Winning is everything,” Stewart said Thursday as she set out her stall for 2026. “You do what you have to do to win.” She witnessed in the summer of 2022 the power of Trump endorsement to upend a Republican primary race. With a late Trump endorsement, Greenwich Republican Leora Levy surged ahead of party endorsed U.S. Senate candidate Themis Klarides. Levy coasted to a 10 point win over Klarides, the former House Republican leader, a few days after Trump endorsed Levy by phone at a local party event.

Stewart allies have spent an unusual amount of time trying to push longtime veteran Trump supporters Matthew Corey and Peter Lumaj out of the early going in the Republican competition for governor.

“Our state is stagnant because stagnant because our leaders are stagnant,” Stewart said, pairing the claim the belief that Governor Ned Lamont’s popularity is declining. The incumbent Democrat has yet to announce if he will seek another third term. He would be a heavy favorite for re-election against a Republican who tries to explain why she supports Trump’s tariffs on our allies but not on the murderous Putin regime. Sorting through issues, aspirations and records are what proper campaigns do, and that is a good thing.

Posted April 11, 2025.