Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, has a tough task. As he now runs for the US Senate, he claims to be a reasonable, non-Trump Republican, hoping to win over Democrats and independents in a state Joe Biden won by 33 points in 2020. He repeatedly insists he is a “straight shooter” who eschews “performative politics” and asserts he is “fed up” with politicians who are “more interested in attacking one another than actually getting anything done.” Yet while he casts himself as a sensible moderate who rejects attack-politics-as-usual, Hogan has mounted fierce negative assaults on his Democratic opponent, Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince Georges County. Moreover, he has pulled a giant flip-flop, assailing her performance in office as disastrous, even though Hogan had, prior to this campaign, praised her as a “great” leader and a highly accomplished county executive.
This summer, Hogan’s campaign launched a spoof website with the URL angelaalsobrooks.org that looked like her official site but slammed her on multiple fronts. The site was headlined, “Meet Angela Alsobrooks: Another partisan politician who doesn’t deliver.” It claimed she has failed “to deliver on even the most basic of government functions”—quite a harsh accusation. Echoing a dominant theme of Donald Trump’s campaign, the Hogan-backed site declared that crime in Prince Georges County has “increased to out-of-control levels.” (That was an exaggeration. Overall crime in the county was down as of this summer, though violent crime had ticked up, mainly due to a rise in assaults not involving a weapon and an increase in domestic violence. Carjackings were occurring at a lower pace than the previous year.)
The site also blasted Alsobrooks for “a lack of funding for police and firefighters,” though the budget the county passed on her watch contained an additional $200,000 to help the police fill vacancies and covered the creation of another 50 firefighting positions.
When asked about the misleading or inaccurate information on the site, Hogan said, “I would say that it’s—the whole purpose of the thing was to put out factual information, and it’s facts and nothing but the facts. There’s nothing misleading about it.”
It’s not only through this site that Hogan has bashed Alsobrooks. While campaigning, he has repeatedly lambasted her on crime, declaring that ever since she became county executive “it’s skyrocketed out of control.” Resorting to a routine political attack, he has accused her of being “very soft on crime.”
Yet not so long ago, Hogan was praising Alsobrooks. In an interview in March with Axios, Hogan was asked whether, when he was governor, he had a “warm working relationship” with Alsobrooks. He replied, “I do.” Queried about running against her, he said, “I think well, hopefully, it’ll be, you know, maybe something that’s missing in politics these days, where instead of just—you know, you can passionately disagree about issues without being disagreeable, or you can talk about your positions on issues without attacking the person. But I’ve, I’ve had a good relationship with her for a long time. I think she’s been a good county executive.”
Two years earlier, Hogan was even more of a fanboy for Alsobrooks. In April 2022, as governor, Hogan signed into law a measure to fund a major commercial development project in Prince George’s County. The next day he held a joint press event with Alsobrooks to celebrate, and he gushed about her: “I want to just thank the County Executive for her incredible leadership. This really is her vision that brings us all together here today… I want to sincerely thank you, Madam County Executive, for the incredible partnership that we’ve had through the entire time that you’ve been county executive. I want to say you’re doing a great job… I want to say the County Executive, Angela Alsobrooks, is also super bad.” He hailed this project, which she had championed, for bringing “more jobs and more economic development to the neighborhoods right here where I grew up.”
At this press conference, Hogan, whose father was the Prince George’s county executive from 1978 to 1982, laid it on thick: “I shouldn’t say this, because I’ll get in trouble, but my dad is a former county executive, and one of my best friends for many years was [county executive] Wayne Curry. And I’ll say, I can’t remember a better county executive than Angela Alsobrooks. Thank you so much for your leadership.”
That was quite an endorsement: better than dad.
During his gubernatorial stint, Hogan complimented Alsobrooks on other occasions. In a television interview in December 2022, he said, “She’s a friend. She’s a great leader.” The following month, he even commended her for her handling of crime: “Some people are taking it more seriously than others. In Prince George’s County, they’ve got a crime issue, but the county executive, Angela Alsobrooks, is taking dramatic action. She’s instituting curfews. She’s keeping kids off the streets so they’re not committing crimes, and seems to be supporting police in their efforts to break up some of these criminal gang activities.”
Hogan’s current attacks on Alsobrooks are the usual stuff of politics, nothing surprising. The problem is that Hogan has been selling himself as a different kind of Republican—he says he will be a “pro-choice” senator, though as governor he vetoed a bill in 2022 that would have expanded abortion access in the state—and a different kind of politician, one who who opts out of the “polarization” of the Trump era. (He vows not to vote for Trump, who endorsed him.) Yet Hogan has no trouble firing misleading charges and harsh rhetoric at a woman he recently lauded as the best Prince Georges county executive in decades. This flip-flop shows Hogan is nothing but the sort of politician he claims to despise.
