Best Outcome Is for Trump to Resign, GOP Senator Toomey Says

A former Republican ally of Donald Trump said the president “spiraled down into a kind of madness” after losing the election, and that the best option for the U.S. now is for him “to resign and go away as soon as possible.”

“It does not look as though there is the will or the consensus to exercise the 25th Amendment option. And I don’t think there’s time to do an impeachment,” Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “The best thing would be a resignation.”

Toomey said Trump, through his “outrageous behavior in the post-election period,” culminating in his role in Wednesday’s violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, isn’t a viable candidate for office “ever again.”

The president has spent the two months after his election defeat repeating unsubstantiated claims about election fraud that have been knocked down in dozens of lawsuits but have been widely adopted by his supporters and backed by some GOP lawmakers.

Trump urged his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, the day Congress was due to officially seal his election defeat.

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, one of several of his tweets promoting the day. “Be there, will be wild!”

@MeetThePress

WATCH: Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) tells Meet the Press, “the best thing would be a resignation” from President Trump. #MTP
@SenToomey: “The best way for our country is for the president to resign and go away as soon as possible”

3:28 PM · Jan 10, 2021

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Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said on ABC’s “This Week” that Trump’s incitement of the Capitol riot was impeachable. Christie has been a close ally of Trump for years.

Still, Toomey said Trump’s most recent actions were a step beyond what had been accepted for years as his typical behavior.

“What he did this past week is wildly different from the offensive tweets that were common during his presidency, and I don’t think that those tweets clearly indicated that this was coming,” he said.

Waning Influence

Separately, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Toomey suggested the GOP would put the Trump era in the past, and that the soon-to-be ex-president wouldn’t have the same kind of influence on the party going forward.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday told lawmakers to be “prepared to return to Washington” this week, suggesting she is considering impeachment or another formal response to Trump’s encouragement of supporters who attacked the Capitol.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who’s been critical of the president, said he’s not convinced impeachment was the right move “because it victimizes Donald Trump.”

There are a “lot of ideas with censure, preventing him from being able to run again,” Kinzinger said, adding that “we were very close to actually having members of Congress killed” during Wednesday’s riot.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said on ABC that Trump “represents a clear and present danger” while remaining in office.

“What happened Wednesday was insurrection against the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

— With assistance by Yueqi Yang, Justina Vasquez, and Daniel Flatley

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