The HouseGOP X account dropped a post that could be read as a shocking repudiation of former President Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner. The GOP message excoriated, without naming him, a “man who can’t even be held responsible for mishandling classified information properly” — and further asserted that someone in that position has “absolutely no business occupying the Oval Office.”
🚨 A man who can't even be held responsible for mishandling classified information properly has absolutely no business occupying the Oval Office.🚨
— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) February 11, 2024
Trump antagonists found it easy — and satisfying — to read the ambiguous GOP post as a self-evident condemnation of Trump, not Joe Biden, who was surely its intended target.
The House Republicans were responding to Special Counsel Robert Hur‘s newly released, year-in-the-making report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, which concluded that Hur’s long DOJ investigation did “not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
With the case of Trump’s allegedly felonious handling of and refusal to return classified documents still in federal court, Democrats and other anti-Trumpers were happy to read the HouseGOP post as a repudiation of Trump, not Biden — especially as the insult came from Trump’s most loyal following.
(House Republicans — not least Speaker Mike Johnson — have been reportedly been taking marching orders from Trump’s “puppeteering” palace in Mar-a-Lago.)
The GOP’s post said in full: “A man who can’t even be held responsible for mishandling classified information properly has absolutely no business occupying the Oval Office.”
Reactions dug down into the idea that the GOP statement implicated its own man. “This is what [Special Counsel] Jack Smith thinks too,” wrote one commenter. Another wrote: “Agree Trump refused to return them, obstructed justice and violated the law and disclosed highly classified information to an Australian Business man. Oh and by the way special counsel for Trump indicted him, special counsel for Biden exonerated him.”
More to the point, and more Republican, was the reaction below, drawing a natural conclusion about the expected emergence of Nikki Haley.
Agree 100% . I assume the party will now be endorsing @NikkiHaley
— Andrew C Laufer, Esq (@lauferlaw) February 12, 2024
