Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) on Sunday called on his fellow Republicans to reject the comments of White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who’d said earlier in the day that there was a “special place in hell” for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“[T]his is not who we,” Flake told Republicans. “This cannot be our party.”
Fellow Republicans, this is not who we are. This cannot be our party. https://t.co/xkGMYfoR9w
— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) June 10, 2018
In tweets, President Donald Trump cited a press conference Trudeau held at the end of this weekend’s G7 summit as the reason he refused to sign an agreed-upon joint communiqué authored by the summit’s attendees.
Two White House advisers, Peter Navarro and Larry Kudlow, followed Trump’s actions with explosive Sunday show appearances.
In reality, though, Canada said days before Trudeau’s G7 summit press conference that it would retaliate with its own tariffs in response to new American tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports.
“These are things that the prime minister has said before, basically,” Kudlow acknowledged to CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan Sunday. “But he didn’t say them before after a successful G7 communiqué where President Trump and the others all worked in good faith to put a statement together.”
“Is that necessary?” Kudlow added later in the interview. “Where’s the good faith? Where’s the optimism?”
H/t The Hill.