Donald Trump is headed to Capitol Hill to meet with Republican lawmakers, but a former GOP congressional staffer doesn't expect them to talk much about policy and instead will focus on keeping their presumptive presidential nominee one step ahead of the law.
The former president will return to the U.S. Capitol for the first time since the Jan. 6 insurrection, and political adviser Amanda Carpenter told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Trump likely hopes to extract assurance from congressional Republicans that they will help him escape legal consequences for provoking that attack, as well as the other cases in which he's been indicted or already convicted.
"We are not a big-tent party right now because Donald Trump expects Republicans in any position of power, whether you're the House speaker, a Senate Republican, to act as his legal and political shield," said Carpenter, a former senior staffer to senators Jim DeMint and Ted Cruz. "That's why Donald Trump is going to the Hill today. He can say, his campaign aides can say they'll talk about his legislative agenda. We already see what that looks like with the endless negotiations to nowhere that have been led by House Republicans into the Biden family, into Merrick Garland. This is where this is going, this is how he wants the party to act as his shield. That's the reason Paul Ryan isn't there anymore."
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The former GOP House speaker has questioned Trump's fitness for office and pledged not to vote for him, although he stopped short of endorsing President Joe Biden, and Carpenter said more Republicans must speak out against the party's likely nominee.
"It's good that there are other Senate Republicans who won't take that meeting, but they're saying, 'Oh, it's a scheduling conflict,'" Carpenter said. "Come out and say, 'I am not going to meet with someone who is practically and morally responsible,' in the words of Mitch McConnell, 'for sending a mob to the capitol and stopping the peaceful transfer of power.' We need to start saying it very plainly, very clearly, in ways that are unmistakable, because there is a faction of Republicans who are not going to go along with this. They're not successful, obviously, in stopping Trump from becoming the Republican nominee once again for the third presidential election in a row, but they need to be vocal and make it known that they are there, and that is the only way we're going to grow that Republican resistance that will be responsible for having any chance of making the party responsible again."
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