Senate Republicans hesitate to give Trump more oxygen after raucous town hall
Emily Jacobs
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Senate Republicans offered mixed reactions to former President Donald Trump’s litany of controversial stances at his CNN town hall Wednesday evening.
The former president suggested he would be able to end the Russian war in Ukraine in “one day, 24 hours.” Trump said that while Russian President Vladimir Putin “made a mistake” invading Ukraine, he would not call him a war criminal because doing so would further complicate peace efforts. He also said Republicans should have the United States default on its debt if the White House refuses to negotiate “massive” spending cuts, one of numerous moments from the night that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign reportedly plans to use in new advertising.
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Asked on Thursday about those claims and others, including Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the results of the 2020 presidential election, Republican senators had a range of responses.
“He’ll have to explain his own answers,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) told the Washington Examiner. “Any of the rest of us that try to, I’m sure it wouldn’t make sense anyway.”
Braun said the Republican who secures the 2024 GOP presidential nomination will need to “have a plan that the American people are going to buy into, that makes us competitive in the swing states. That’s where elections are won or lost for the president, and that’s where the big Senate seats are determined. I don’t think we’ve done a very good job at that over the last two or three rounds.”
Another GOP senator, who insisted on anonymity in order to speak candidly, told the Washington Examiner that members had been advised not to comment on the former president. Doing so, they said, only gives him more oxygen.
Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD) quipped to reporters on Thursday morning that it “looked like a lot of Democrat campaign ads being written last night.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), who was the first member of the Senate to endorse Trump’s 2024 reelection bid, declined to object to the former president’s suggestion that he would consider pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, saying, “that’s up to him. You’d have to obviously look at it case by case, there’s a lot of people came in here, shouldn’t have come in here and broke things.”
Pressed about Trump’s Ukraine comments, Tuberville said that while he wouldn’t respond to specifics, he agreed that diplomacy was necessary for a peace deal with Russia.
Trump’s Ukraine response sparked a harsher reaction from Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), who said Thursday he wouldn’t support the former president’s 2024 bid over their diverging positions.
“I think President Trump’s judgment is wrong in this case,” Young told reporters from the Capitol. “President Putin and his government have been engaged in war crimes. I don’t believe that’s disputed by most who’ve looked into this. … That’s why I don’t intend to support him for the Republican nomination.”
Young later told Punchbowl News that the Trump issue will “be a point of disagreement in the conference, though I would be surprised if it became contentious between us. I don’t think there’s any problem with acknowledging that President Trump has habitually lost at the ballot box. And that’s certainly an important view that needs to be vocalized.”
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Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), a staunch Trump critic, said the former president’s town hall performance acted as a preview of how he’ll govern if reelected.
“I think you, you see what you’re gonna get, which is a presidency untethered to the truth and untethered to the constitutional order,” Romney said. “The idea that people who’ve been convicted of crimes are all going to be pardoned, or, for the most part, pardoned, is quite a departure from the principles of the Constitution and of our party.”