Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) tried their best to justify former President Donald Social media post about Trump’s racist facts from Friday, in which the former commander-in-chief said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a “DEATH” and called his former transportation secretary Elaine Chao “Coco Chow.”
The senator, enraged after being asked during a CNN appearance about the post, defended Trump’s tendency to prefer “nicknames.”
“As you know, the president likes to give people nicknames. You can ask him how he came up with the nickname,” Scott told Dana Bash on Sunday State of the Union. “I’m sure he has a nickname for me.”
Trump’s post — which attacked McConnell for allowing Democratic bills to pass in defiance of the former president and also accused the minority leader of trying to “take the country down with him” — delivered a fury at its explicit call for violence and its attack on Chao, the wife of McConnell, a US citizen and born in Taiwan.
Bash went on to highlight the senator, who holds the leadership position of the Senate as head of the Republican National Senate Committee, on how Republicans can stand up to a position that has clearly racist.
“It is never, never okay to be a racist. I think you always have to be careful if you are in the public eye with the way you say things. You want to make sure you’re included,” said Scott from Naples, Florida, where he is overseeing recovery efforts after Hurricane Ian. “You want to make sure that – yesterday in the neighborhood I was in, we could have people from ten countries living there. That’s what’s great about this country. I know what I’m trying to do is make everyone – everyone, especially all their children believe that they have hope and live the dreams of this country. I hope no one is racist. I hope no one said anything inappropriate. I will do all I can. “
That excuse was not enough for a former McConnell adviser.
“If you read the whole thing out loud, if you’re on the street and you hear someone mumbling that on a street corner, you wouldn’t say, ‘hmm, give this person the presidency or the office. Republican candidate for president,'” CNN analyst (and former McConnell adviser) Scott Jennings told Bash, “You’d say ‘call 911’ because it sounds like a deranged, misguided person. lewd is bouncing off the streets and can endanger themselves and others It’s outrageous, it’s beyond the bland. Every Republican ought to be able to say that. It’s not good for the party. It’s not good for him.”
