Former Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) lay dying, partially paralyzed after a recent stroke and a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer, when he gathered his wife and son around his hospital bed.
“Are there any Muslims in the hospital?” he asked them, according to a Wednesday report from the Daily Beast.
His son and wife both told the site Bennett said, “I’d love to go up to every single one of them to thank them for being in this country, and apologize to them on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump.”
Bennett, a veteran senator swept out of office in 2010 by Tea Party favorite Mike Lee, was deeply troubled by Trump’s rise to prominence in his party, Joyce Bennett told the Beast.
His family said Bennett, nearing the end of his life, felt an urgent desire to redress the rhetoric about Muslims during the 2016 election cycle and was particularly disturbed by Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration.
“In the last days of his life this was an issue that was pressing in his mind…disgust for Donald Trump’s xenophobia,” Bennett’s son, Jim, told the site. “At the end of his life he was preoccupied with getting things done that he had felt was left undone.”
While traveling home to Utah for Christmas, Bennett’s wife said he approached a woman wearing a hijab in the airport to “apologize on behalf of the Republican Party.”
“He would go to people with the hijab [on] and tell them he was glad they were in America, and they were welcome here,” Joyce Bennett told the site.
Bennett’s Mormon faith keenly informed his feelings about Trump’s policy plans, and his son said he recognized “the parallel between the Mormon experience and the Muslim experience.”
Bennett died May 4 at the age of 82.
The Freedom Caucus will have to introduce a motion stripping Bennett’s family of their survivor benefits and anything else the government passes on to deceased members of Congress.
While I appreciate his statements, too often those in the halls of power only realize the errors of their ways on their deathbed. Power, religion, and money all corrupt, but none of that matters when your time left to be alive is suddenly counted in days not years. It’s a harsh truth, and we’ve seen it play out again and again throughout history.
I hope that Sen. Bennett finds peace in the hereafter. However, the GOP is in part the product of his actions. Sen. Bennett was swept from office by Mike Lee, because he was not conservative enough, but the fact is that he was part of the obstructionist actions of the GOP from the time Obama was elected and he took part in the hateful rhetoric spews of the GOP and Mitch McConnell until 2012. He should be apologizing. Not only did he help set up the rise of Trump but he was part and parcel of the reason the Tea Party got its hold on the GOP. He will not be here to see the end of the handiwork he and his old school GOP pals started, but at least at the end, he realized just how monstrous a party he helped to shape was.
Trump: Bob Bennet was a disgrace. He was a Romney clone, just poorer. What’s up with Mormons anyway? I will look into deporting all of them.
With all due respect to Bennett and his family this sounds more than a little the death bed apologies offered by Lee Atwater to the many people he defamed in the name of the GOP. It’s funny how GOPers, as they retire form politics or life, suddenly repent the course they and their party are on.