GOP Rep. Peter Meijer Says Republicans Have No Option But to Back Trump: ‘There Was No Other Path’
Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) said Sunday that the GOP has no better option than continuing to back former President Donald Trump.
Meijer made the remarks while speaking to Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press, as the anchor questioned how Trump has remained relevant in the party despite being publicly condemned by Republicans following the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
“There was no alternative. There was no other path,” Meijer said. “And given how President Biden, when he was elected into office, said he would be moderate and look for bipartisan solutions. But then after, and frankly, I blame the former president for this, after we lost the two senate seats in Georgia and the Senate flipped, it became an exercise in trying to be an LBJ or FDR style presidency and enact transformational change in the absence of any compelling mandate from the American people to do so.”
Meijer went on to highlight the “steep divide” between those who continue to support the former president and those who do not, partially blaming it on President Joe Biden’s desire to implement “transformational change” in the United States.
“So that gave the rallying signal. That created a very steep divide, and at the end of the day, there’s no other option right now in the Republican Party, and that’s a sad testament,” Meijer added.
Todd pushed back on the notion that Biden was responsible for the divide in the GOP.
The host questioned if the blame falls on members of the Republican Party, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and their inability to “kick their Trump habit.”
“If you have one party plummeting into the depths and the other just uses that as an excuse to go further, to go more to an extreme, to go more away from any sort of governing consensus, and towards trying to enact whatever the will of the most extreme constituency they have is, that is a recipe for both parties to drive further away from anything that resembles serving the American people as a whole,” the congressman replied.
Meijer was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6th insurrection, and voted to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.
He was not, however, in support of holding Mark Meadows in criminal contempt, explaining to Todd that he believed Meadows “was cooperating at least in some degree” with Congress.
Watch above, via MSNBC.
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