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Republican presidential candidate Joe Walsh has a lot of tweets to explain

Joe Walsh wants to primary Trump—his Twitter feed is more racist than the president's.

 

Claire Goforth

Tech

Posted on Aug 26, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 5:29 am CDT

Yesterday, former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh threw his hat into the presidential ring. He’s running against President Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020.

Today on Morning Joe, Walsh called Trump “unqualified,” “unfit,” “a child,” “reckless,” “erratic,” and “a narcissist,” adding, “If he’s our nominee in 2020, the Republican Party is going to get spanked, because young people don’t like Trump. Women don’t like Trump and people who live in the suburbs don’t like Trump.”

Plenty of people would probably use similar language to describe Walsh, a former radio host who’s been suspended from Twitter for inciting violence against then-President Obama and yanked from the airwaves for using racial slurs.

And they need only look to Twitter for the receipts.

The announcement of a presidential run from the dude who’d rather work with a musket than a Democrat was certain to inspire some serious trollage. Attempting to get ahead of it, on August 14, Walsh penned a New York Times op-ed in which he apologized for some of his previous statements.

“In Mr. Trump, I see the worst and ugliest iteration of views I expressed for the better part of a decade. To be sure, I’ve had my share of controversy,” Walsh wrote. “On more than one occasion, I questioned Mr. Obama’s truthfulness about his religion. At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There’s no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them.”

People weren’t particularly assuaged by Walsh’s hat-in-hands apologies for promoting the racist birther conspiracy and calling Obama a traitor.

“First he needs to man-up and admit that calling Obama a ‘Muslim traitor’ was a bigoted lie,” was one such tweet about his candidacy. Another wrote, “Do you still think President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim?”

By far the most scathing response to Walsh’s candidacy came from a parent of one of the children killed at Sandy Hook.

“Of all the disappointing news out there-watching y’all take Joe Walsh seriously is way up there. Do you not remember what he said about Trayvon Martin? About SH families? That’s gonna be a huge nope to the 1,000th degree from me. To infinity and beyond,” tweeted Nelba Márquez-Greene, whose daughter Ana Grace was killed in the mass shooting.

Sounds like Walsh won’t be done with his apology tour any time soon.

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*First Published: Aug 26, 2019, 1:45 pm CDT