Key Senate Republicans want President Donald Trump to back away from his threat to campaign against Sen. Lisa Murkowski if she seeks reelection in 2022, even though she said she is "struggling" with whether she can back his reelection campaign.
"I'd leave Lisa alone," Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the second-ranking Republican senator, reports The Hill. "She's a member of our conference, and we want to keep it that way."
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, an adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he does not "support that at all," when asked about Trump's tweet last week that he'd vote for anyone with "a pulse" over her.
Murkowski, who did not vote for Trump in 2016, told reporters that she has "struggled with it for a long time" when it comes to backing the president, even though she would keep working with him and his administration.
Trump fired back that in 2022 he'd be in Alaska to campaign against Murkowski, telling Republicans there to "get any candidate ready, good or bad, I don't care, I'm endorsing. If you have a pulse, I'm with you!"
Murkowski Monday said she is standing by her comments, as she thinks "it's important that we have a president that's working to bring people together and bring people together," as "tone and words matter."
When asked if she'd be less likely to support Trump, she recalled that during the debates over repealing Obamacare that she'd said she couldn't "live in fear of a tweet," and that she's at that same place now with Trump.
Murkowski was appointed to her Senate seat in 2002 and won her first full term in 2004. She then, in 2010, was the first Senate candidate to win a seat during a write-in campaign. Sens. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and John Barrasso, R-Wyo. said Monday they haven't forgotten that and they know she'd be hard to defeat.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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