Former President Trump expressed regret over endorsing Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) in the 2020 Nebraska Senate race, saying he “should have never given him the endorsement.”
“He’s bad news, Ben Sasse. He begged for my endorsement, the day after he started hitting me and we hit much harder than he knows how to hit. He’s bad news,” Trump said during a telerally held for Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster (R).
“Should have never given him the endorsement. He was horrible at the beginning. And then he was so good … and then the following day, literally, he started hitting back,” he added.
Trump endorsed the Nebraska Republican in September 2019, saying in a tweet at the time that he had “done a wonderful job representing the people of Nebraska.”
But Sasse later became one of Trump’s most fervent critics and was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict the former president following the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
The Nebraska senator in a 2021 emailed statement condemned Trump’s repeated, baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
“Those lies had consequences, endangering the life of the vice president and bringing us dangerously close to a bloody constitutional crisis,” Sasse said. “Each of these actions are violations of a president’s oath of office.”
Sasse’s current term is set to expire in 2027.
The former president sounded a similar note of regret over a past endorsement in March 2021 when he spoke about previously backing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in the state’s primary runoff, after Kemp refused to engage in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the state.
“In the case of Gov. Kemp, he was in last place or just about in last place. I endorsed him, he ended up winning the election and he certainly was not very effective for the Republican Party, to put it nicely,” Trump said in an interview with the conservative news outlet Newsmax at that time.
“So I think that was an endorsement that hurt us, but sometimes that will happen,” the former president noted. ”You can’t pick 100 percent of the winners.”