TRUMP AIDE THREATENS PRIMARY CHALLENGE
AGAINST GOP MEMBER
Kathryn
Watson
MSN |
An aide
to Donald Trump called for Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash, a member of
the conservative House Freedom Caucus and outspoken critic of Trump, to be
challenged and defeated in the 2018 congressional primary.
Dan
Scavino Jr., White House director of social media and senior aide to Mr. Trump,
labeled Amash a “big liability” in a tweet on Saturday, urging followers to
“defeat him in primary.”
Scavino’s
tweet was the latest White House attack on Freedom Caucus members who helped
derail the Republican health care bill, after Mr. Trump threatened in a tweet Thursday morning
to oppose the conservative Republicans in their 2018 primaries.
Amash
fired back quickly on Twitter, saying Mr. Trump and the establishment have
become one and the same. He also tweeted a link to his fundraising page,
encouraging challengers to “bring it on.”
Amash,
a conservative with libertarian positions on privacy and Fourth Amendment
issues, has consistently been one of the most vocal Republican critics of Mr.
Trump. Amash was one of the first Freedom Caucus members to respond to Mr.
Trump’s threat to oppose the conservative Republicans in 2018, tweeting that
the president has succumbed to the “D.C. establishment.”
He went
on to call Mr. Trump a “childish bully,” saying
that his attacks would be “constructive in the fifth grade. It may allow a
child to get his way, but that’s not how our government works.”
Amash
has been criticizing Mr. Trump for months, so much so that the Huffington Post
profiled him in a December piece called, “The one House Republican who can’t stop criticizing
Donald Trump.”
“I’m
not here to represent a particular political party; I’m here to represent all
of my constituents and to follow the Constitution,” Amash told the Huffington
Post at the time.
Mr.
Trump’s White House continues to fuel a divide among the Republican caucus that
has only become more strained since his inauguration. Recently, Mr. Trump has
turned his frustration on the limited government-minded HFC, whose members have
generally tried to balance support with reservations about the president.
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