Former President Donald Trump’s White House economic adviser said Trump was damaging his chances of winning another presidential election.
Larry Kudlow, who is now a host on Fox Business, said on the network Wednesday evening that a recent string of controversies by Trump are harming the former president’s support levels.
“I don’t understand what our former boss is doing,” Kudlow said, speaking with Trump’s former counselor Kellyanne Conway.
“I love the guy, but I do not understand Kanye West, hanging out with white nationalists, hanging out with anti-Semitic people, talking about ending the Constitution or postponing the Constitution,” he said.
“I don’t get it, I don’t understand why he’s saying it, and if he says it why hasn’t he, you know, apologised for it or corrected the record or something, because he’s losing support left and right, I hear it everywhere.”
Kudlow also said that Trump was too focused on claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Last month, Trump had dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West who has courted controversy with his anti-semitic comments, along with noted white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
This led to criticism from his own party, including from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Trump also received backlash after seemingly calling for the termination of the Constitution, saying that election fraud allowed for the “termination of all rules” including “those found in the Constitution.”
Trump has since said that he was not calling for the Constitution to be cancelled.
The Republican Party is in the midst of an autopsy over its worse-than-expected performance during the midterm elections, when the party gained a slim majority in the House but lost out in the Senate.
Many of the candidates that Trump backed lost their races, including Herschel Walker, who lost the Georgia Senate runoff on Tuesday, giving Democrats an outright majority in the chamber.
Many Republicans have blamed Trump for Walker’s loss.
Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton tweeted that “the outcome in Georgia is due primarily to Trump, who cast a long shadow over this race.”
“His meddling and insistence that the 2020 election was stolen will deliver more losses,” Bolton added. “Trump remains a huge liability and the Democrats’ best asset. It’s time to disavow him and move on.”
John Thune, the Senate minority whip, said he didn’t think there was any question that Trump was a factor in the GOP’s midterm performance.
“A lot of the candidates that had problems in these elections were running on the 2020 election being stolen, and I don’t think independent voters were having it,” he said.
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