Pres. Trump appears to have a unlikely defender when it comes to his battle against the mainstream media: Former Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee.
Chafee, the Governor of Rhode Island from 2011-2015, a former US senator, and a Steve Doocy doppelganger, told Rhode Island radio station WPRO-AM this morning that the news media “has been on a full onslaught against Trump, and I think it’s kind of tiresome. He won. I didn’t vote for him, but he won, and let’s let him get his feet under him and try and build an administration, and move on.”
Chafee brought up his issues with the media’s coverage of his own 2016 run.
“They immediately went to trivial things like when I said the US should adopt the Metric system, and during the debate, they gave me 8 minutes out of 2 hours,” said Chafee. “The people in the mainstream media didn’t want to have a conversation about the war in Iraq. I kind of knew that going in, and they just re-enforced it during the debate.” Chafee also complained that he was never invited to appear on any Sunday public affairs programs.
The host of the program pushed back against Chafee’s complaints about the media, bringing up that he banned state officials from appearing on talk radio in 2011 when he was Rhode Island’s governor. Chafee admitted he may have been wrong by taking that action. “Maybe that was a mistake, because we do have to do a better job of communicating, always,” he said.
Chafee, like Trump, has changed his party affiliation multiple times. He was a Republican senator from 1999-2007, was elected Rhode Island governor as an Independent in 2010, and became a Democrat in 2013. He told WPRO-AM that he voted for Bernie Sanders in the Rhode Island Democratic primary, and for Hillary Clinton in the general election. He also said that he disagrees “with about 99.9 percent of what President Trump is proposing,” but that he does commend Trump’s approach to Russia.
That seems like a rather substantial .1 percent.
Chafee also told the station said he isn’t ruling out another run for Rhode Island governor and even joked that there’s a presidential race in 2020.
“You know,” Chafee said, “I’ve done crazy things before.”