Politico | ‘Ugh’: Republicans cringe after Trump’s attack on 75-year-old protester
- Most Republican senators tried to deflect questions about the US president’s latest controversial tweet
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Marianne Levine and Burgess Everett on politico.com on June 9, 2020
If there was ever a tweet from US President Donald Trump that Senate Republicans didn’t want to touch, it’s this one.
For four years, Senate Republicans have endured a regular gauntlet of reporters’ questions about Trump tweets, ranging from attacks on their own colleagues to telling a handful of congresswomen of colour to “go back” to the countries they came from.
Trump’s tweet Tuesday morning attacking a 75-year old protester in Buffalo – who was shoved by the police and bled from his head after falling – stunned some in a caucus that’s grown used to the president’s active Twitter feed. After examining a printout of the tweet, Senator Lisa Murkowski gasped: “oh lord, Ugh”.
“Why would you fan the flames?” she said of the president’s tweet. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
But though the moderate Murkowski was nearly rendered speechless, the missive mostly failed to get a rise out of Senate Republicans. Many know Trump will tweet something else soon they will be asked to respond to, even if the Buffalo tweet seemed a new frontier for Trump’s insult-laden social media persona.
