Republican lawmakers are ignoring the evidence to blame the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on anyone but themselves.
Although the gunman behind the shooting has been identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old white conservative, GOP leaders have decided to collectively attack the Secret Service—specifically, the members that are women and people of color.
Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Representative Cory Mills was quick to divert attention away from the conservative shooter and toward the nonobvious target: diversity, equity, and inclusion hires.
“Look, I’m not sure about who the individuals are on the individual detail of the Secret Service, but I can tell you under this Biden administration, the one thing I’ve seen is massive DEI hires,” Mills, a former U.S. Army sniper, told Jesse Waters Primetime, appearing to suggest that only white men should be members of the Secret Service. “And I can tell you, when you primarily go after DEI, you end up with D-I-E.”
But Mills wasn’t the only Trump ally frustrated with a service detail that kept the former president alive.
“Somebody really dropped the ball,” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told Fox Sunday afternoon. “You’ve got a … DEI initiative-person who heads up our Secret Service. You know, she was working at Pepsi before this. I know she was a former Secret Service agent, but still.”
“This is what happens when you don’t put the best players in. It’s a complete failure on our part,” he said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Burchett baselessly pushed that Democrats’ focus on the violent rhetoric of MAGA Republicans—including likening Trump to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and describing Trump’s political ambitions as fascist—was the reason behind the shooting, despite the fact that Crooks’s former classmates repeatedly described him as holding exclusively conservative ideals.
“It is a manifestation of what they brought upon us,” Burchett said. “It is not the Republicans’ fault.”
And network hosts also jumped in on the fury, including Jeanine Pirro and Laura Ingraham, who were seemingly unhappy with the women who risked their lives and bodies to create a human shield for Trump.
“You and I, in our own way, have been trailblazers in our fields,” Ingraham bemoaned. “And we support women in all we do. But when it comes to shielding the body of someone who is six foot three, and shielding him, you can’t do it if you’re five-five.”
