Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), under fire in her home state after a father was gunned down on Monday by ICE agents she helped fund, is about to suffer another blow courtesy of President Donald Trump, a political analyst argued Wednesday.
Appearing on MS NOW on Wednesday morning, John Heilemann said that Trump’s nationally televised speech planned for Thursday night could create a new “nightmare” for the Maine Republican, as well as other GOP candidates who will be on the ballot in November.
Noting that recent ICE killings occurred in Maine and in Texas, where Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is running for a Senate seat, Heilemann observed that Trump is going to talk about election theft in 2020, which is going to compound GOP midterm election difficulties.
“These are states where those two candidates would rather be talking about almost anything other than what the president is going to be talking about on television tomorrow night, really raising the questions of totally ungrounded claims of election fraud in 2020 or whatever the big news is that Donald Trump says he's going to break,” he told the “Morning Joe” co-hosts.
"That is a nightmare for Susan Collins,” he predicted. “That's a nightmare for Ken Paxton. The voters in those states do not want to be talking about that. And then in those two states, these obviously absolutely outrageous ICE killings, just in the last couple of days, an issue that had bedeviled the Republican Party in the period of time through Minneapolis that seemed to have receded for a little while and now is back on the front pages.”