The Love Gov is out, just two months in.

Disgraced former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford suspended his primary challenge to President Trump during a noon press conference at the New Hampshire Statehouse on Tuesday.

“I planned of filing here Friday at the Statehouse, but I’m not going to do that. Let me tell you why,” Sanford told reporters. “What I’ve seen and observed – I’ve really been mulling on this the last two weeks or so – is that all of the oxygen is leaving the room in terms of meaningful debate, whether Republican or Democrat but particularly on the Republican side, on what comes next in our country on a whole host of issues.

“In essence, it’s pulling all of the oxygen out of the room at least in Republican circles that you cannot have a meaningful debate on what we do about that debt, and deficit. What comes next financially in this country. Instead, it is red versus blue team and a complete debate about are you on that team or the other team, end of story,” Sanford said, referring to impeachment efforts.

Sanford launched his no chance bid to represent Republicans in the 2020 presidential election in Philadelphia in September, when zero supporters showed up to listen to him lecture about the nation’s spiraling debt, though his oversized check for “one trillion” dollars did prompt passersby to inquire about his message.

Sanford was still toting the check around at the Tuesday press conference, where he blamed the impeachment circus for diverting attention from the nation’s ballooning debt.

“You’ve got to be a realist and what I did not anticipate is an impeachment,” he said.

Sanford described his run as “a lot shot, but we wanted to try and interject this issue, how much we’re spending, into the national debate which comes along once every four years.”

Sarah Longwell, a never-Trump Republican strategist, told The New York Times that while Sanford has plenty of political experience, his campaign was a recipe for disaster from the beginning, in part because of his unwillingness to critique the president.

“If you’re going to run against Trump without being able to criticize this abuse of power, there doesn’t seem to be a clear case for your candidacy,” Longwell said. “He always tried to make it about an issue. A single-issue candidacy around the debt in this era can’t find much oxygen.”

Sanford lost re-election to Congress in 2018 after President Trump endorsed his challenger, Katie Arrington, who eventually lost the seat to Democrat Joe Cunningham in the general election.

“He took a gun and shot me in the head,” Sanford said of Trump in September, “and that’s the end of that.”

Sanford earned the ax as one of the president’s most outspoken Republican critics in the House, despite his support for Trump in the 2016 election. Trump returned the criticism by mocking Sanford for his high-profile infidelity scandal while governor and by campaigning against him in 2018.

Sanford disappeared from South Carolina for several days in June 2009 and told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. When he was later busted coming off a plane from Argentina, he confessed to an affair with a divorced 43-year-old mother of two in Buenos Aires.

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The father of four also admitted to cheating on his wife on previous occasions and the Sanfords divorced the next year. Despite the scandal, Sanford avoided impeachment, completed his second term as governor, and later won back the seat he previously held representing South Carolina’s 1st Congressional district from 1995 to 2001.

Sanford was re-elected to the post in 2014.

In September, the so-called Love Gov hinted there was a good chance his presidential campaign could flame out fairly fast.

At his October 16 formal launch just three weeks ago, zero supporters showed up.

“If there’s an appetite in terms of people’s concerns on the financial realities of our country and the way in which we are at a tipping point, then there’s going to be some level of measure and movement with regard to the campaign,” he said two months ago. “And if there’s not, there won’t be. And it will be short-lived.”

Sanford is one of a trio of Republicans to mount a primary challenge against Trump for the 2020 general election nomination, a group the president has dubbed “The Three Stooges.” Former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh and former Massachusetts governor William Weld are also challenging Trump, despite Republican parties in at least four states canceling the primary to put the president on the ballot.