Trump’s ex-chief of workers says worry amongst Republican politicians is the ‘consequence’ of disagreeing with him | EUROtoday

Former White House chief of workers and Republican Party chair Reince Priebus waved off a GOP senator’s considerations about threats from Donald Trump supporters because the “consequence” of disagreeing with a “popular” president on Sunday.

Priebus was interviewed on ABC’s This Week and responded to current feedback from Lisa Murkowksi, a centrist Republican senator from Alaska. She has damaged with the president on the ground of Congress quite a few instances, most notably in 2017 when she and two different Republicans voted to sink a GOP proposal that may have gutted the Affordable Care Act, higher referred to as Obamacare. Earlier this yr, she additionally opposed the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of Defense.

Murkowski, in a dialogue with native enterprise and nonprofit leaders in Alaska, was reported by the Anchorage Daily News as fearing “retaliation”, presumably from Donald Trump’s supporters, over talking out in regards to the sweeping cuts to federal companies being pursued by the White House’s DOGE initiative.

“We are all afraid,” Murkowski mentioned, in accordance with the information outlet. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”

Trump’s former White House chief of workers, now an ABC News contributor, responded on Sunday by calling such “retaliation” the “consequence of having a different opinion than a very popular president.”

He went on to explain Murkowski as “a senator who does nothing but win elections” after a half-hearted condemnation of the rhetoric she has confronted: “Certainly, rhetoric should calm down. But … if she’s talking about the retribution of going against the president and suffering at the ballot box, well, that’s the consequence of having a different opinion than a very popular president.”

But Murkowski was in all probability not talking merely of political retaliation within the type of a major problem, which she has very lately mentioned she doesn’t worry coming from Trump or his DOGE deputy, Elon Musk.

More doubtless, she was talking in regards to the precise threats of violence that she and different opponents of Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats alike, have confronted from his supporters. She has been the goal of a number of circumstances of violent threats that led to arrests because the January 6 assault on Congress in 2021.

The information web site RawStory reported in 2018 that Murkowski’s Facebook web page was inundated with violent threats of rape and sexual abuse after she voted in opposition to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court that yr.

Another feminine Republican senator who voted in opposition to Hegseth’s nomination earlier this yr was additionally topic to violent threats, in accordance with her Democratic colleague Tammy Duckworth.

“Joni Ernst received so many threats and attacks outright, you know, threatening her, saying that they would primary her all the way through to threats against her own security,” Duckworth advised MSNBC.