Dingell responds to Trump Christmas post: 'Civility matters'
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) stressed the importance of civility in response to former President Trump’s attack on her and her family over the Christmas holiday.
“We got to treat each other with dignity and respect. Civility matters. Words have consequences,” Dingell said in an interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room” on Wednesday when asked to respond to Trump calling her a “LOSER” and attacking her late husband, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), who died in 2019 and holds the record as the longest-serving member of Congress in history.
“Many people have had a tough hard year,” Dingell continued. “We need some calm, some love, some hope, not more negative words with division. And I think each and every one of us has a responsibility to stand up and ask everybody to treat each other with that respect and dignity.”
Dingell’s remarks on CNN come as her feud with Trump continues to escalate. After Trump told his political opponents on Christmas to “rot in Hell,” Dingell responded in a Tuesday interview that his attack was “one of the most pathetic Christmas greetings I’ve heard.” She also raised earlier attacks from Trump, mentioning Trump’s comment from 2019 that her husband was “looking up” from Hell.
Trump picked up on Dingell’s remark about her husband and claimed in a post Tuesday that Dingell abruptly changed her attitude about the former president following her husband’s funeral.
In the Wednesday interview, she did not dispute his assertion. She said she remembered the former president’s kindness to her after her husband died and said she chooses to remember that moment instead.
“I remember I did not call Donald Trump. He called me,” she said, disputing his earlier claim that she called him. “And I remember his kind words that day. I was grateful that he lowered the flags. And I remember that act of kindness. And I choose to remember it as an act of kindness, and a touching thing at a very hard time.
“And maybe all of us could remember that just having empathy and compassion, and a little kindness will make everybody's day a little better,” Dingell added.
Dingell also defended her late husband’s service and said he deserved all the high honors he got after he died.
Trump “goes back to my late husband, who was a giant, a great man who touched many things. And he earned everything he got at his funeral when he was buried. It was Nancy Pelosi and, actually, Mitch McConnell and others that helped arrange some of the things.”
Dingell offered her recollection of the events after her husband’s death after Trump first described what he remembered.
“When I gave, as President, her long-serving husband, the absolute highest U.S. honors for his funeral, a really big deal, she called me, crying almost uncontrollably, to say that she couldn’t believe I was willing to do that for a Democrat. She thanked me profusely,” Trump wrote earlier, about Dingell.
“Two months later, she was back on the trail ranting and raving about ‘TRUMP.’ She ought to focus on how badly the Auto Workers of Michigan, and the USA as a whole, are being treated by CHINA, to which Crooked Joe Biden has given this once great industry away!” he added.