JASPER, Ind. — Republican Senate nominee Mike Braun warmly embraced President Trump’s agenda on Sunday even as he distanced himself from the commander in chief’s provocative rhetoric.
Is special counsel Robert Mueller’s federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and possible collusion with Moscow by Trump or his associates, a “rigged witch-hunt?”
“That again — it would be his choice of words,” Braun said. “I would say it is gone to where it’s a distraction for all the other stuff that needs to be done and that if they can’t put up, they ought to shut up, and get the thing done, because it’s dragged on too long — without doing anything that points to the original reason that the Mueller probe was started.”
Is it fair to label the media the “enemy of the people?”
“Those are not words I’d use,” Braun said. “I would use: ‘Don’t editorialize if you’re in the press, report it.’ I’m trying to think where I see that. It looks like it’s gotten to where it’s more op-ed than it is, here’s the news.”
But any hint of separation with Trump stopped there, as Braun made clear in a wide-ranging discussion with the Washington Examiner just before walking the parade route through Jasper, his hometown, for the annual “Strassenfest” festival celebrating the Southern Indiana community’s German roots.
On the president’s trade policies, which are making supporters all over Midwest farm country nervous as China and other nations retaliate for tariffs the Trump administration has placed on imports: “In life, and especially in business, there’s the short run and the long run. People that are successful know how to see into the long, he said. “Everybody needs to give it a little time to work out.”
On Trump’s North Korea gambit: “The dynamic there for something to happen has never been better than what it is right now,” Braun said. “With Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo and the fact that we’ve got this dialogue going, we’re obviously in a far better spot than what we were leading up to this point. And President Trump doesn’t get any credit for that.”
On Trump’s coddling of Vladimir Putin after his two predecessors tried and failed to charm the Russian strongman: “If you think that [Trump] is being fooled by Putin — if he is being fooled by Putin, then you might have a case. But I think it’s clear from the statement that [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats and others recently made that we’re not being fooled. They are our enemy on the world scene, they are our competitors,” Braun said.
On style as well, Braun took pains to draw a distinction between his approach to politics and Trump’s — and to explain why the president might be on the right track, even if it sometimes makes him uncomfortable.
In a state that delivered 56.5 percent of its 2016 vote to Trump and remains largely satisfied, Braun’s support for the president is smart politics as he moves to outflank Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly. Indeed, it’s Trump’s popularity, and Donnelly’s Senate voting record that has GOP insiders so optimistic about Braun, despite a challenging national environment.
“I’m a typical Hoosier: Understated, hard-working; humility is — those are three things you could say [about me.] But for anybody to make it on the national scene, I think you probably had to have bravado,” Braun said. “[Trump] is the embodiment of anybody that’s upset with business as usual or the status quo.”
Braun, 64, spoke with the Washington Examiner from the headquarters of the automobile parts distributor he built from a regional player with one truck, 15 employees and 25,000 square feet of warehouse space to a national juggernaut with 350 trucks, 900 employees and 2.5 million square feet of warehouse space.
Braun, whose political experience is limited to a short stint in the Indiana legislature and this campaign, sees himself as part of a new wave of Republicans — with Trump as the trailblazer — who are bringing a lifetime of business experience to Washington to tackle intractable challenges that both political parties have failed to address for decades.
If elected in the midterm elections, Braun imagines joining forces in the Senate with Republicans like Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and David Perdue of Georgia, and hopefully, he says, fellow GOP Senate nominees Mitt Romney of Utah and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida.
“I would probably not have run had [Hillary Clinton] been the president,” Braun said. “I’m not doing it to make a career in politics, I’m doing it because I think there’s a rare opening here for maybe some folks from the business community to go there, have a caucus within the Senate that’s measurable.”
