Joe Walsh, a former Illinois congressman ad tea party favorite turned radio talk show host, announced a longshot challenge Sunday to President Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020, saying the incumbent is "completely unfit" for office and must be denied a second term.
"Somebody needs to step up and there needs to be an alternative" among Republicans, Walsh told ABC's "This Week," adding that "the country is sick of this guy's tantrum. He's a child. ... He lies every time he opens his mouth."
Already in the race is former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.
Walsh narrowly won a House seat from suburban Chicago in the 2010 tea party wave but lost a 2012 reelection bid and has since hosted a radio talk show. He has a history of inflammatory statements regarding Muslims and others and declared just before the 2016 election that if Trump lost, "I'm grabbing my musket."
But he has since soured on Trump, criticizing the president in a recent New York Times column over growth of the federal deficit and calling him "a racial arsonist who encourages bigotry and xenophobia to rouse his base."
Walsh promises to contest Trump from the right as opposed to Weld, who is regarded as fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Weld was the 2016 Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee.
The road ahead for any Republican primary challenger will certainly be difficult.
In recent months, Trump's allies have taken over state parties that control primary elections in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and elsewhere. State party leaders sometimes pay lip service to the notion that they would welcome a primary challenger, as their state party rules usually require, but they are already working to ensure Trump's reelection.
South Carolina Republicans have gone so far as to discuss canceling their state's GOP primary altogether if a legitimate primary challenge emerges to eliminate the threat.
At the same time, polling consistently shows that Trump has the solid backing of an overwhelming majority of Republican voters. An Associated Press-NORC poll conducted this month found that 78% of Republicans approve of Trump's job performance. That number has been hovering around 80% even as repeated scandals have rocked his presidency.
"Look, this isn't easy to do. ... I'm opening up my life to tweets and attacks. Everything I've said and tweeted now, Trump's going to go after, and his bullies are going to go after," Walsh told ABC.
Asked whether he was prepared for that, Walsh replied: "Yes, I'm ready for it."
Walsh, 57, rode a wave of anti-President Barack Obama sentiment to a 300-vote victory over a Democratic incumbent in the 2010 election. He made a name for himself in Washington as a cable news fixture who was highly disparaging of Obama.
Walsh was criticized for saying that the Democratic Party's "game" is to make Latinos dependent on government just like "they got African Americans dependent upon government." At another point, he said radical Muslims are in the U.S. "trying to kill Americans every week," including in Chicago's suburbs.
He lost his 2012 reelection bid by more than 20,000 votes to Democrat Tammy Duckworth, who was elected to the U.S. Senate four years later.
Walsh told Obama to "watch out" on Twitter in July 2016 after five police officers were killed in Dallas. Just days before Trump's 2016 win over Hillary Clinton, Walsh tweeted: "On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. You in?" Walsh later said on Twitter that he was referring to "acts of civil disobedience."
Walsh wrote in his New York Times column that "In Mr. Trump, I see the worst and ugliest iteration of views I expressed for the better part of a decade."
"On more than one occasion, I questioned Mr. Obama's truthfulness about his religion," Walsh wrote. "At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There's no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them."
Walsh said his 2016 vote for Trump was actually against Clinton and faulted Trump for his unwillingness to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"He encouraged Russian interference in the 2016 election, and he refuses to take foreign threats seriously as we enter the 2020 election. That's reckless," Walsh wrote. "For three years, he has been at war with our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as he embraces tyrants abroad and embarrasses our allies. That's un-American."
Associated Press writers Tom Davies in Indianapolis and Steve Peoples in New York contributed to this report.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote Friday on a resolution that would grant new “rights and privileges” to Palestine and call on the Security Council to favorably reconsider its request to become the 194th member of the United Nations.
The United States vetoed a widely backed council resolution on April 18 that would have paved the way for full United Nations membership for Palestine, a goal the Palestinians have long sought and Israel has worked to prevent, and U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood made clear Thursday the Biden administration is opposed to the assembly resolution.
Under the U.N. Charter, prospective members of the United Nations must be “peace-loving,” and the Security Council must recommend their admission to the General Assembly for final approval. Palestine became a U.N. non-member observer state in 2012.
“We’ve been very clear from the beginning there is a process for obtaining full membership in the United Nations, and this effort by some of the Arab countries and the Palestinians is to try to go around that,” Wood said Thursday. “We have said from the beginning the best way to ensure Palestinian full membership in the U.N. is to do that through negotiations with Israel. That remains our position.”
But unlike the Security Council, there are no vetoes in the 193-member General Assembly and the resolution is expected to be approved by a large majority, according to three Western diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because negotiations were private.
The draft resolution “determines” that a state of Palestine is qualified for membership – dropping the original language that in the General Assembly’s judgment it is “a peace-loving state.” It therefore recommends that the Security Council reconsider its request “favorably.”
The renewed push for full Palestinian membership in the U.N. comes as the war in Gaza has put the more than 75-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict at center stage. At numerous council and assembly meetings, the humanitarian crisis facing the Palestinians in Gaza and the killing of more than 34,000 people in the territory, according to Gaza health officials, have generated outrage from many countries.
The original draft of the assembly resolution was changed significantly to address concerns not only by the U.S. but also by Russia and China, the diplomats said.
The first draft would have conferred on Palestine “the rights and privileges necessary to ensure its full and effective participation” in the assembly’s sessions and U.N. conferences “on equal footing with member states.” It also made no reference to whether Palestine could vote in the General Assembly.
According to the diplomats, Russia and China which are strong supporters of Palestine’s U.N. membership were concerned that granting the list of rights and privileges detailed in an annex to the resolution could set a precedent for other would-be U.N. members — with Russia concerned about Kosovo and China about Taiwan.
Under longstanding legislation by the U.S. Congress, the United States is required to cut off funding to U.N. agencies that give full membership to a Palestinian state – which could mean a cutoff in dues and voluntary contributions to the U.N. from its largest contributor.
The final draft drops the language that would put Palestine “on equal footing with member states.” And to address Chinese and Russian concerns, it would decide “on an exceptional basis and without setting a precedent” to adopt the rights and privileges in the annex.
The draft also adds a provision in the annex on the issue of voting, stating categorically: “The state of Palestine, in its capacity as an observer state, does not have the right to vote in the General Assembly or to put forward its candidature to United Nations organs.”
The final list of rights and privileges in the draft annex includes giving Palestine the right to speak on all issues not just those related to the Palestinians and Middle East, the right to propose agenda items and reply in debates, and the right to be elected as officers in the assembly’s main committees. It would give the Palestinians the right to participate in U.N. and international conferences convened by the United Nations — but it drops their “right to vote” which was in the original draft.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas first delivered the Palestinian Authority’s application for U.N. membership in 2011. It failed because the Palestinians didn’t get the required minimum support of nine of the Security Council’s 15 members.
They went to the General Assembly and succeeded by more than a two-thirds majority in having their status raised from a U.N. observer to a non-member observer state. That opened the door for the Palestinian territories to join U.N. and other international organizations, including the International Criminal Court.
In the Security Council vote on April 18, the Palestinians got much more support for full U.N. membership. The vote was 12 in favor, the United Kingdom and Switzerland abstaining, and the United States voting no and vetoing the resolution.
Follow AP's coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
FILE - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23, 2022, at the U.N. headquarters. The U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote Friday, May 10, 2024, on a resolution that would grant new “rights and privileges” to Palestine and call on the Security Council to favorably reconsider its request to become the 194th member of the United Nations. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson, File)
