President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump defended Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) after questions about her views on race surfaced ahead of the state’s runoff election.
“This is nothing new,” said Lara Trump, a senior adviser to the president’s 2020 campaign, on Fox Business’s “Varney & Co.” on Monday. “The Democrats always scream ‘racism’ at a Republican contender in any field across the country.”
“Listen, Cindy Hyde-Smith apologized for these remarks and I think if you actually watch the way it happened I think a lot was taken out of context and really blown up out of proportion,” she added.
{mosads}Hyde-Smith has faced backlash after she said that she liked one of her political supporters so much that she would sit in the “front row” of a “public hanging” with him.
“I would fight a circle saw for him,” she said of the supporter. “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”
Since video of her statement surfaced, she has lost the support of Walmart, Pfizer, AT&T, Union Pacific, Boston Scientific, and Major League Baseball.
All have requested that their contributions be returned.
A 2014 photo of her wearing a Confederate soldier’s cap also resurfaced earlier this month and her campaign labeled a report that she attended a Mississippi segregation academy in the 1970s a “new low.”
Hyde-Smith faces Democrat Mike Espy in a Senate runoff election on Tuesday.