Trump vs. Gowdy?

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump was not happy when Trey Gowdy endorsed Marco Rubio. Trump, who once endorsed Gowdy as his pick for Attorney General, let loose on the Benghazi Committee Chair:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump assailed a leading committee chairman in Congress on Sunday for backing Marco Rubio, Trump’s rival for the party’s nomination.

Trump, the front-runner in the Republican race, needled Trey Gowdy for his role as chairman of the House of Representatives select committee investigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed.

In October, Hillary Clinton, 68, front-runner for the Democratic nomination, calmly deflected committee criticism of her handling of the attack while she was President Barack Obama’s secretary of state.

“In total (the committee) was not good for Republicans and the country. I mean beyond Republicans, it was bad for the country. I hope he does a whole lot better for Marco,” Trump, 69, said of Gowdy on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.”

The conservative news site Townhall reported Gowdy’s planned endorsement, and an email from the Rubio campaign confirmed that Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, would travel with Rubio, 44, on the campaign trail on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Gowdy was in a tough spot on Benghazi. Beyond the media’s adoring coverage of Clinton, and its equally adversarial attitude towards the GOP, asking hard questions would have called in to question the wisdom of the foreign policy preferred by Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and a slew of other candidates for the White House- that of hawkish intervention virtually anywhere and everywhere. As Michael Brendan Dougherty noted at the Week:

The fact is that the opposition party in America can’t honestly investigate Obama’s foreign policy without doing fatal collateral damage to its own. And so Hillary Clinton can say in public that the intervention she championed in Libya is “smart power at its best,” even though that country is being terrorized by ISIS and other jihadists and is one source of the refugee crisis. The supposedly mean-spirited GOP that would do anything to attack Clinton has run into something it won’t do: challenge our recklessly hawkish foreign policy.

So the party’s taste for intervention certainly tied Gowdy’s hands, as delving into what authority Clinton had for whatever operation we were running in Benghazi might have set a precedent limiting the authority of any future Republican President to engage in similar unliateral exercises without the support of Congress. 

That said, Gowdy has shown himself to be a principled, ethical conservative leader who’s not afraid to tell the truth. Will voters respect his decision, or will they turn on him for choosing the establishment Rubio? What do you think?

AAN Staff

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