With exactly two weeks to go before Donald Trump assumes control of the White House, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and the president-elect still haven’t directly touched base.
“While I’ve had a number of conversations with the administration, I have not spoken to the president-elect directly,” he said in a press conference yesterday, per WBAL.
However, this isn’t a huge concern for the Republican governor, who said he and Trump wouldn’t have “anything specific” to talk about, anyway.
Hogan’s refusal to back Trump during his presidential campaign will be hard to forget. The governor famously told the AP in March, “I’m not a Trump fan. I don’t think he should be the nominee,” later skipped the Republican National Convention in Cleveland where Trump was officially nominated and opted to write in his father on Election Day rather than vote for the real estate mogul.
However, Hogan did send the president-elect his congratulations after Trump’s Nov. 8 victory and said last month that he hopes to work with him in the years ahead.
In his diplomatic way, Hogan noted at yesterday’s conference that he was on good terms with the Obama administration while the two were simultaneously in office and said he expects the same with Trump. He also said he has already spoken with Vice President-elect Mike Pence about the priority of boosting transportation infrastructure.
“If we do that, that will help us here in Maryland get many of the projects [that have] been a primary focus of mine,” he said.
Some non-groundbreaking speculation: The top of Hogan’s list of transportation funding priorities likely includes expanding the Howard Street Tunnel to accommodate double-stacked trains, as well as improving the stretch of I-95 and connecting roadways leading to the future development haven of Port Covington. Mayor Catherine Pugh already took care of some of the outreach work for Hogan on that end by including those projects in the letter she delivered to Trump in early December.
