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Former White House chief of staff and Republican Party chair Reince Priebus waved off a GOP senator’s concerns about threats from Donald Trump supporters as the “consequence” of disagreeing with a “popular” president on Sunday.
Priebus was interviewed on ABC’s This Week and responded to recent comments from Lisa Murkowksi, a centrist Republican senator from Alaska. She has broken with the president on the floor of Congress numerous times, most notably in 2017 when she and two other Republicans voted to sink a GOP proposal that would have gutted the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Earlier this year, she also opposed the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of Defense.
Murkowski, in a discussion with local business and nonprofit leaders in Alaska, was reported by the Anchorage Daily News as fearing “retaliation”, presumably from Donald Trump’s supporters, over speaking out about the sweeping cuts to federal agencies being pursued by the White House’s DOGE initiative.
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, according to the news outlet. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
Trump’s former White House chief of staff, now an ABC News contributor, responded on Sunday by calling such “retaliation” the “consequence of having a different opinion than a very popular president.”
He went on to describe Murkowski as “a senator who does nothing but win elections” after a half-hearted condemnation of the rhetoric she has faced: “Certainly, rhetoric should calm down. But … if she’s talking about the retribution of going against the president and suffering at the ballot box, well, that’s the consequence of having a different opinion than a very popular president.”
But Murkowski was probably not speaking merely of political retaliation in the form of a primary challenge, which she has very recently said she does not fear coming from Trump or his DOGE deputy, Elon Musk.
More likely, she was speaking about the actual threats of violence that she and other opponents of Donald Trump, Republicans and Democrats alike, have faced from his supporters. She has been the target of multiple cases of violent threats that led to arrests since the January 6 attack on Congress in 2021.
The news site RawStory reported in 2018 that Murkowski’s Facebook page was inundated with violent threats of rape and sexual abuse after she voted against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court that year.
Another female Republican senator who expressed reservations about Hegseth’s nomination earlier this year was also subject to violent threats, according to her Democratic colleague Tammy Duckworth.
“Joni Ernst received so many threats and attacks outright, you know, threatening her, saying that they would primary her all the way through to threats against her own security,” Duckworth told MSNBC.
