Former President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. said on Friday that he is considering backing “plenty” of primary challenges to Senate Republicans in next year’s midterms — likely advancing his father’s effort to exact revenge on those who have crossed him.
After a vengeful speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference attacking Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) who voted to impeach his father last month, the president’s son told Fox News in an interview that he would also back “plenty” of primary challenges against incumbent Republican senators.
“I think there’s a couple that I would certainly get involved in,” Trump Jr. said, adding that his father “would get involved in picking individual races and individual people that have been supportive of him, and not others.”
Imitating the stance of the former president who has been plotting ways to instill fear and seek retribution against those who crossed him, Don Jr. unleashed broadsides against the GOP for shielding candidates who have opposed his father.
In the Friday interview the president’s son accused the GOP establishment of blindly throwing “cash, time, money and energy to help failing candidates who have no charisma, no personality, no political chops, get over the line simply because they’ve been there a few years. That’s the kind of nonsense that has to go, and I think it will.”
Don Jr. also insisted during the Fox News interview that the Republican Party remains “without question” the party of his ex-president father.
“I think you hear it from the voices. I think you see it in the speeches of others that are in government,” he said. “I think it’s pretty clear. And it should be.”
The comments came after Don Jr. suggested during a CPAC speech earlier in the day that the No. 3 House Republican who had voted to impeach his father last month should be challenged in a primary race next year.
Trump Jr. had declared during an interview earlier in the week that he took pride in his father’s refusal to “lose gracefully” in the 2020 presidential race.
“Donald Trump has shown that you don’t have to do that,” he said at the time. “You can actually push back.”
The former president’s unwillingness to accept defeat and efforts to peddle conspiracies over a stolen election ultimately fomented a violent insurrection on the Capitol last month.
The younger Trump’s attack on his father’s critics and Republicans who refused the former president’s antidemocratic attempts to hang onto the White House, come as a minority of Republican members in Congress make efforts to step out of Trump’s shadow while a vast majority remain firmly under it — even making visits down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the former president and cement his support.
