DES MOINES, Iowa – U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley told The Iowa Torch that former President Donald Trump would have a better chance of winning the 2024 presidential election if he didn’t have a “get even attitude.”
Last week, Trump told conservative talk show host Glenn Beck that he would have “no choice,” but to lock political opponents up.
Beck noted Trump opposed the “lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.
“And then when you became president, you said, ‘We don’t do that in America. That’s just not the right thing to do.’ That’s what they’re doing. Do you regret not locking her up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?” Beck asked.
“The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us,” Trump replied. “I always had such great respect for the office of the president and the presidency and but the office of the president. And I never hit Biden as hard as I could have. And then I heard he was trying to indict me and it was him that was doing it.”
Grassley, as former chairman and current ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has complained about the politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureaul of Investigation. He disagreed with Trump’s statement.
“The president of the United States can’t lock anybody up, only the juries do that through the jury process. I think his chances of being elected would be a little better if he was less prone to take a ‘get even’ attitude,” he told The Iowa Torch.
“Now I think he’s been wrongly accused of a lot of things, and it’s all been done for political purposes, and I’m hearing from Iowans that they are disgusted with the fact that we’ve got a double-standard of justice in the United States. It’s just not right. You prosecute Republicans, but you don’t prosecute Hunter Biden, as an example, or you are going to have a plea bargain that would almost let him off scot free. It just doesn’t look right,” Grassley added.
He said he wants a Republican president and the nominee is likely to be Trump.
“I want him to be elected and I want him to be elected because of the policies that he demonstrated in his first term of office. And he was cheated out of the presidency because of all of the actions that were taken against him. But his chances of being elected are better if he tries to expand his election base, and keep the focus on getting Biden out-of-office. We can’t stand four more years of the socialistic programs of this administration, and it is going to take a Republican president to turn that around,” Grassley said.
Listen to the full interview that was part of the senator’s weekly “Capitol Hill Report” below:
