Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) became the first Republican senator to call on President Trump to resign on Friday, after a deadly insurrection at the Capitol this week left five people dead.
“I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News in an interview.
In a scathing 17-minute interview with the outlet, Murkowski blamed President Trump directly for encouraging the mob attack on the Capitol while Congress counted the Electoral College votes. She pointed to how Trump told his supporters “to fight” on Wednesday morning, even after Vice President Mike Pence had made clear that he did not have the constitutional authority to disrupt the count the way Trump had asked.
“Even even after the vice president told President Trump that, he still told his supporters to fight. How are they supposed to take that? It’s an order from the president,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News. “And so that’s what they did. They came up and they fought and people were harmed, and injured and died.”
While also bashing Trump’s poor handling of the COVID-19 outbreak, Murkowski suggested that Trump “only wants to stay” in the White House “for the title” and for “his ego.”
“He’s either been golfing or he’s been inside the Oval Office fuming and throwing every single person who has been loyal and faithful to him under the bus, starting with the vice president,” Murkowski said, according to the newspaper.
“He needs to get out. He needs to do the good thing, but I don’t think he’s capable of doing a good thing,” she later added.
She also blamed Trump for Republicans’ defeat in the two Georgia Senate runoffs that will effectively give Democrats control of the Senate, while questioning her place in the Republican Party, if it could not find itself some distance from Trump.
“If the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me,” she said.
