Rep. Mark Sanford sounded the alarms, saying he lost his primary election not because of his voting record but because he just wasn’t "Trump enough," a revelation that he cautions is a lot bigger than just a South Carolina House race.
"People are running for cover because they don’t want to be on the losing side of a presidential tweet," the South Carolina Republican told "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC. "The idea that you can’t speak out and say, ‘I disagree with you here, but I agree with you on 90 percent of the stuff’ … is, again, a twilight world that I’ve never seen."
On Tuesday, Sanford lost his first race in his decadeslong political career to state Rep. Katie Arrington, who staked a large part of her challenge on who would be more supportive of President Donald Trump.
Despite voting for the House’s plan to repeal Obamacare and supporting Trump’s tax overhaul plan, two issues on which some moderates and conservatives in his party bucked the president, Sanford was viewed as disloyal for his critical comments, including in a POLITICO Magazine interview, about how Trump had "fanned the flames of intolerance." In the past, Sanford had prodded Trump to release his tax returns.
Among Sanford’s concerns is whether the president will ever pay a price for frequently spouting falsehoods. Sanford, a former South Carolina governor, recognizes that he is not the best messenger for truth telling.
In 2009, through a spokesman, he said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, but in reality he was on another continent with his mistress. Unlike Trump, though, Sanford said he paid a price for that lie.
"There is no seeming consequence to the president and lies," Sanford said, referencing an old legend about the first president and a cherry tree. "We’ve gone from George Washington, ‘I can’t tell a lie by cutting down the apple tree,’ to they’ve become so replete that nobody even questions him anymore. And that’s, again, a dangerous spot to be in a reason-based republic."
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