Having Donald Trump as the party’s presidential nominee puts Republicans in the uncomfortable position of being forced to continuously defend the seemingly-endless stream of offensive comments he spews forth, as Rick Wilson ably pointed out a few days ago. But California Congressman Duncan Hunter seems to be taking a unique approach, attempting to defend Trump by saying something even more offensive.
As Heat Street’s Emily Zanotti reported, Trump attacked Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the judge assigned to the class action lawsuits against Trump University, by claiming that Curiel’s Mexican heritage made him unfairly biased against Trump, calling him “Mexican” and a “hater.”
Curiel, a Baby Boomer born in Indiana just like this reporter’s own mother, is a natural born American citizen. Again, he’s as American as my Mom is. Trump’s attacks were strongly condemned by most Republicans, including Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who said he would withhold endorsing Trump until he renounced his comments about Curiel.
Rep. Hunter, on the other hand, offered an absurd defense of Trump on Sean Hannity’s radio program.
He did call it a “mistake” for Trump to bring up Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” and to mix his business with his presidential campaign, but he then engaged in what Buzzfeed characterized as a “thought experiment” in which he compared Curiel judging Trump’s case to a “Muslim-American of Iraqi descent” judging a trial against Chris Kyle:
“What I like to do is take these arguments out to [their] logical extremes,” Hunter said on Sean Hannity’s radio program. “So let’s say that Chris Kyle, the American sniper, is still alive and he was on trial for something, and his judge was a Muslim-American of Iraqi descent. Here you have Chris Kyle, who’s killed a whole bunch of bad guys in Iraq. Would that be a fair trial for Chris Kyle? If you had that judge there? Probably not. And Chris Kyle could probably say, ‘this guy’s not gonna like me.’”
Kyle was the Navy SEAL veteran and sniper with the most confirmed kills in American military history, whose best-selling autobiography American Sniper became an Oscar-winning film. He was murdered in 2013 by a Marine veteran who Kyle was trying to help cope with PTSD.
Besides the obvious issues in assuming Hunter knows what Kyle, who is beyond the reach of mortal communications, would say, he commits the same type of racist assumptions that Trump did in his original comments: assuming that an American judge cannot fairly adjudicate someone’s case because of ethnic, racial, or religious issues that have nothing to do with the case at hand.
Hunter went on to tell Hannity that he didn’t think Trump’s comments were a big deal.
“It’s not the first time, but it’s probably not going to be the last time [Trump] says something like this either,” said Hunter.
“Things like this, they’re on the periphery,” he continued, arguing that this controversy shouldn’t be relevant in the presidential race. “[It’s] stuff that doesn’t really matter as how he would be as President.”
We’ll have to wait and see which American hero Hunter will try to slander next time he has to defend Trump for something. Perhaps Audie Murphy or even Sen. John McCain, whom Trump attacked in the early days of his campaign.
As for Curiel, he spent years as a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney’s Office fighting Mexican drug cartels and was so successful he was a target of an assassination plot. He seems unfazed by the inane comments of presidential candidates and Congresscritters alike.
Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter: @rumpfshaker.
