Senate GOP leaders turn on Trump over suspend-the-Constitution talk – By Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine (Politico) / Dec 5, 2022
It’s the second time in two weeks that the former president has prompted criticism from within his party, after a dinner with high-profile antisemites last month
Top Senate Republicans are distancing themselves from Donald Trump in growing numbers after the former president’s call to suspend the Constitution — though there’s no sign it will lead them to actively oppose his 2024 presidential campaign.
In his latest of an ongoing series of calls to be reinstated as president, Trump on Saturday falsely cited “massive fraud” in his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden before calling for a “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in order to reinstate him as president or hold a new election. Many election officials, including Trump’s own former attorney general, Bill Barr, have affirmed that no voter fraud occurred on a scale significant enough to affect Biden’s victory over Trump.
While few Republicans spoke out publicly before returning to Washington on Monday, Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said “of course I disagree with that” when asked about Trump’s comments. The No. 2 Senate Republican would not say whether he’d support Trump if the former president wins the GOP nomination in 2024 and said he’s “just not going to go there at this point — that’s a long way off.”
But Thune did predict Trump’s remarks would fuel the ambitions of Republicans who’d want to take on the former president in a 2024 primary: “It’s just one of those intuitively obvious things, whether a candidate for office has sort of a bedrock principle, ‘are you going to support the Constitution?’” Thune said. “For him, it’s not all that unusual. But it will be the grist and plenty of fodder for those that are looking to get into that race.”
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