Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) stepped up over the weekend as one of the few Republican senators willing to criticize President Donald Trump for asking foreign countries to dig up dirt on his political rivals.
“I thought the President made a big mistake by asking China to get involved in investigating a political opponent,” the senator told the Bangor Daily News on Saturday. “It’s completely inappropriate.”
Few other Republicans have spoken out against Trump after he openly declared last week that Ukraine and China ought to investigate 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
On Friday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) slammed Trump’s “brazen and unprecedented” comment, saying that such a request was “wrong and appalling.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), an occasional Trump critic, also chided the President on Friday.
“Hold up: Americans don’t look to Chinese commies for the truth,” Sasse said in a statement to the Omaha World-Herald. “If the Biden kid broke laws by selling his name to Beijing, that’s a matter for American courts, not communist tyrants running torture camps.”
