“The truth is the Republican Party is big tent”.
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It was Pence’s first formal visit to Capitol Hill since Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, tapped him in July as his running mate. He is scheduled to address Senate Republicans during a weekly party luncheon Tuesday afternoon.
One GOP source in the room told CNN that Nebraska GOP Rep. Jeff Fortenberry asked Pence about concerns his daughter has raised with him about some Trump comments about women.
Sen. Bob Corker says Mike Pence gave out his cell number in the Republican senators’ weekly meeting. And more than half are African-American, a historically strong Democratic voting bloc that Trump has recently appealed to on the campaign trail.
And previous year, when Pence faced a backlash over the IN religious liberty law he had signed, which many argued legally sanctioned discrimination against the LGBT community, Pence had no problem lambasting the media, calling reporters, “shameless” and “reckless” IN the way they were covering the issue.
Cruz’s spokesman Jeff Roe said Tuesday that Cruz’s meeting with Pence was about “two fiscal conservatives hanging out”. Polls have found that most Trump supporters believe President Barack Obama is Muslim.
This is the backdrop against which we can assess Pence’s unwillingness to denounce Duke.
Trump’s gaffes have been a byproduct of his off-the-cuff, bombastic campaign style, which has made it possible for him to spend next-to-nothing on advertising, but has created a series of conflicting, often untrue pronouncements.
And Pence isn’t the only one on the Republican ticket dangerously giving white supremacists a sense that he wants their support.
The Texas Republican senator and onetime rival of Trump’s has refused to endorse the billionaire.
“She has pneumonia and, well, you know, it’s curable”, Reid said flatly at a news conference. “But our goals are identical”, Pence said. While Ryan and his leadership team emphasized similarities between the desires of the Trump campaign and House Republicans, Senate Republicans heaped much less praise on their nominee and his messenger after their meeting with Pence.
Again, it seems as though Pence’s refusal to describe Duke as deplorable is more about maintaining that line of attack on Clinton than actually defending Duke, and we will soon see if it is a worthwhile trade-off. “I can pretty safely say everyone felt good about the Pence election when it was announced and felt even better about it today”, McConnell said. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., would not say whether the meeting with Pence was focused on policy, however.
Pence responded by saying the Trump campaign is unveiling a child care proposal on Tuesday.
“For all the world, I have no idea why this man keeps coming up”, he said, calling Duke a “bad man”, and saying that the issue has served as a mere distraction. Republicans and Democrats are fighting for political points over Clinton’s claim that many of his supporters are racist, sexist and homophobic.
Speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday, Pence declined to call Duke “deplorable”, though he disavowed his support. Still, Clinton doesn’t consider “deplorables” everyday Americans, either. “I mean, the millions of people who support Donald Trump around this country are not a basket of anything”.
Mike Pence, the GOP vice presidential nominee, met with House Republicans Tuesday morning in what he said was “an emotional return” to a group that he was once a member of for six terms in Congress. “I cried when he dropped out”, Jordan said.
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Clinton said at a September 9 fundraiser in NY that about half of Donald Trump’s supporters are “deplorables”, rattling off that they were sexists, homophobic or racists. “We have said we don’t want his support and we don’t want the support of people who think like him”.
