On Tuesday, President Trump for the second time in one week promoted the primary victory of a conspiracy-theorist, anti-Muslim Republican House candidate. Last week, it was Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon supporter. This week, it was Florida’s Laura Loomer, another fringe figure in today’s Republican Party.
And to hear White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tell it, it’s just an unhappy coincidence.
“The president routinely congratulates people who officially get the Republican nomination for Congress,” McEnany said Wednesday when pressed. “So he does that as a matter of course. He hasn’t done a deep dive into the statements by these two particular women. I don’t know if he’s even seen that, but he supports the Muslim community.”
Two parts of this strain credulity.
The first is the idea that this is just Trump “routinely” congratulating Republicans.
Trump does congratulate many Republicans when they win primaries. But over the past eight days, eight states have held congressional primaries — Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, Minnesota, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming — and more than two dozen non-incumbent Republicans have been nominated. Trump has not congratulated them all “as a matter of course,” nor has he even congratulated the vast majority of them. In fact, he has congratulated just four of them on Twitter. And half of those four were Greene and Loomer.
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