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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

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Donald Trump peddled another unfounded conspiracy theory, this time trying to raise suspicions about a 75-year-old protester who was hospitalised after being shoved by police. Photo: AP

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

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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.”

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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.

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