Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) vowed to fight for more than 1,200 Kansas jobs threatened by President Donald Trump, without ever naming Trump or his threat.
The Kansas Republican made the promise in a post on X Tuesday morning, writing that he would fight to keep the jobs at Bombardier, the Canadian business-jet maker with a large plant in Wichita.
Nowhere in those remarks does Marshall say what put the jobs at risk, who put them at risk, or when.
That threat arrived the previous afternoon, when Trump wrote on Truth Social that he wanted the company shut out of the American market altogether.
"NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES! Their products aren't good enough!" Trump wrote Monday.
Trump argued in the same post that Bombardier depends on American customers while Canada shuts American firms out. More than half the company's revenue comes from the United States, he wrote, and Canada has blocked the American manufacturer Gulfstream Aerospace from doing business there. "If they want our Market, they must build here, and stop treating America like a 'piggybank,'" Trump warned.
Bombardier's Kansas workforce sits in Wichita, and Marshall said he had already raised the matter with the president himself.
"I've already taken that concern inside the Oval Office," Marshall wrote. "We agree on the mission: bring more good-paying manufacturing jobs back to Wichita. America buys more than half of what Bombardier sells. If that's the market, more of those planes should be built here."
Marshall also reached back to the company's history in the city, where Bombardier acquired the storied Learjet operation, and said the company owes Kansas a bigger footprint than it has now.
"I remember when my classmates' parents worked at Learjet—later Bombardier—when it employed well over 3,000 people," Marshall wrote. "Bombardier is obligated to grow that footprint in Kansas again."
Bombardier answered Trump directly, the Associated Press reported Tuesday, pointing out that much of its aircraft is already built by American hands.
The company's supply chain runs through about 2,800 American businesses across 47 states, the AP said. Texas makes wings for its business jets, and flight control parts are made near Los Angeles. Honeywell builds engines for its Challenger jets in Phoenix, and Collins Aerospace makes avionics in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
"Bombardier values its great partnership with American companies and its U.S. employees," the company said in a statement, calling the American aerospace industry a "clear winner on trade and exports."
The connection Marshall left out was supplied within the hour by veteran congressional correspondent Jamie Dupree, who noted on X that the senator had gone quiet on the threat until Tuesday.
"Sen. Roger Marshall R-KS finally talks about the threat to 1200 jobs in his home state - but never says why he has to put out this statement," Dupree wrote. "It's because President Trump threatened on Monday to block aircraft sales by Bombardier in the United States."
Marshall's post also landed just hours after The New York Times published an investigation into his decades as an obstetrician in rural Kansas.
Marshall sued more than 700 patients over unpaid medical bills during his career, and court records show patients were arrested in 81 of those cases after missing court dates, reporter Sarah Kliff found. His lawyers routinely charged an 18 percent annual interest rate, which his longtime attorney told the Times Marshall set in a contract patients signed.
Some of the unpaid bills ran as low as $101, according to the Times. Marshall's lawyers also garnished patients' paychecks and bank accounts, and some of the collection work continued after he was elected to the House in 2016.
Marshall's campaign defended the practice, telling the Times that he treated patients regardless of whether they could pay and that judges, not doctors, issue warrants.
"Sixty days before an election, The New York Times has decided that a rural doctor keeping the hospital's lights on is some kind of scandal. Kansans know better," spokeswoman Payton Fuller said in a statement to the newspaper.
Columnist Dave Helling flagged both stories in the Kansas City Stack, writing over the weekend that the senator was facing a difficult stretch.
"Roger Marshall has had better weekends," Helling wrote on Tuesday.
The pressure arrives as Trump prepares to headline a two-day gathering of Republican donors in Dallas on Wednesday and Thursday, and Marshall is not on the party's list of scheduled speakers, according to the Kansas City Stack.
Marshall's first campaign commercial makes no mention of Trump, Helling reported, and the senator's campaign did not answer an emailed request for comment about the Dallas event.
That distance is new. VoteHub gave Marshall a 100% "Trump score" in February, Helling wrote, and the senator has publicly backed Trump on tariffs that have hit Kansas farmers. Trump endorsed him more than a year ago.
The caution tracks with the state's numbers. A recent YouGov/Economist poll found Trump at negative 14 with Kansas voters, Helling reported, though he cautioned that other surveys show Trump about even there. Trump is especially unpopular in Johnson County, which accounts for a quarter of the state's electorate.
Marshall and his Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton, are scheduled to debate Saturday at the Kansas State Fair.