Republicans Are Still Terrified of Trump
If there’s one thing you can count on Republicans for, it’s to tepidly push back on Donald Trump’s most vile comments.
Trump drilled down harder than ever on fascist language during two weekend speeches. On Saturday, he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” The next day, he promised to use federal law enforcement funds to combat a “military invasion” at the southern border.
But when asked about his comments late Monday, Republican senators had only the mildest of rebukes. “I obviously don’t agree with that. I mean, we’re all children of immigrants,” Senator Shelley Moore Caputo told Politico, somehow managing to “All Lives Matter” immigration.
Senator Roger Wicker said he “certainly wouldn’t have said that,” and Senator Thom Tillis called Trump’s words “unhelpful.”
Senators John Kennedy and Todd Young declined to comment, although Young joked he was “looking forward to another year of answering these questions.”
“Drugs, criminals, gang members, and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities,” Trump said over the weekend.
He then promised to “shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement, including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and DHS.”
No GOP senators have called for Trump to apologize. Their lukewarm stance should come as no surprise, though.
This is a familiar tune for Republican lawmakers. Throughout Trump’s presidency, Republicans regularly evaded questions about his inflammatory rhetoric. Lawmakers would say they hadn’t seen the former president’s posts on social media or during speeches. Sometimes they would say they disagreed with his stance; other times they would quietly adopt his position.
In fact, Republicans were perfectly happy to let Trump’s words slide so long as he continued to give them what they wanted in terms of policy and judicial appointments. This has continued since Trump left office, for instance last November, when Trump met with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and antisemite Kanye West.
No members of Republican leadership ever explicitly condemned the meeting. Some lawmakers even tried to claim that Trump didn’t know who he was meeting or that he had condemned Fuentes’s previous comments.