Susan Collins, Republican Senator and a Key Vote on Healthcare, Criticizes Trump on Twitter
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It’s not exactly novel in 2017 to wake up to an ugly tweet from Donald Trump, but his output this morning was particularly unnerving:
I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017
…to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2017
The cruelty, the pettiness, and the constant thirst for revenge were all on vicious display, and—even more than usual—it was depressing to read this and realize this man is our president. Mark Kornblau, a senior VP of communications at NBC, summed it up well:
Never imagined a day when I would think to myself, “it is beneath my dignity to respond to the President of the United States.”
— Mark Kornblau (@MarkKornblau) June 29, 2017
But if Trump tweeting something embarrassing and mean has become par for the course, so has the silence from congressional Republicans. When the president is essentially greenlighting your political fantasies, it seems a certain amount of vulgarity can be tolerated.
That changed today, at least a little, when Susan Collins, the senior senator from Maine, crafted a subtweet that could only refer to one man:
This has to stop – we all have a job – 3 branches of gov’t and media. We don’t have to get along, but we must show respect and civility.
— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) June 29, 2017
On one hand, it would have been great if she’d included his actual handle in her response, but on the other, her meaning is clear enough.
Collins, one of the so-called “moderates” of the GOP Senate crew, will be a key vote on the AHCA healthcare bill—whenever it comes up for a vote—and there’s already a lot of people hoping that her assessment of Trump’s character might translate into a “no” vote on that piece of legislation. It may be wishful thinking, but at the very least, it’s nice to see a powerful Republican take Trump to task for behavior that continues to disgrace our country.