970x125
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said Democrats and Republicans bear responsibility for escalating rhetoric that has fueled a rise in political violence, following the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
“It’s all of our faults, right? I mean, we stir up the base. If you stir up the base, what do you expect is going to happen?” Mullin said in an interview on CNN, which presented a list of recent instances of violence against political figures. “If you stir a fire, coals are going to come out of it. If you pour gasoline on a fire, it’s going to explode. And sometimes we gaslight the base, and it’s been happening a lot.”
The Oklahoma Republican and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) joined CNN’s Dana Bash for an interview intended to highlight their close friendship, despite holding different ideological views.
Mullin and Gottheimer described each other as good friends, noting their daughters are even writing a children’s book together on the importance of getting along.
“We both believe we’ve got to bring the temperature down,” Gottheimer said. “We disagree on lots of things, but, at the end of the day, we spend time to actually try to have debate and discourse the right way — where you actually go at it about policy differences — and then, at the end of the day, you can have a beer and figure out how you’re going to actually get stuff done for the country, without screaming and yelling.”
Mullin said, however, he thinks Democrats have been “gaslighting this a lot more,” pointing to the Democrats who call President Trump a dictator, refer to Republicans as Nazis and engage in an “attack on Christian values.”
Mullin, who called Kirk a close friend, said the 31-year-old leader was different, noting Kirk sought to foster dialogue on college campuses, including with those who disagreed with him.
“So we all play a role in trying to bring that temperature down. And Josh and I, who, obviously we don’t even agree on religious points of view — but we joke about it all the time — and in political views, but yet we are still very good friends,” Mullin said.
“I mean, before we came on your show, we were sitting here, and we were actually laughing and having a conversation, but we can also be dead serious at the same time,” he told Bash about the Democratic congressman.
Gottheimer pushed back on Mullin’s suggestion that Democrats were more at fault for stirring up charged rhetoric — pointing to Trump describing his political opponents as the “enemy from within” — but he quickly steered the conversation back on message.
“The worst thing that could happen, to me, right now, is the president or any of our leaders, coming out and saying it’s their fault and going after the other side. What we need to do is take the temperature down and say, none of this — Markwayne to your point, what you said earlier — none of this is OK. We have to get back to actually talking to one another,” Gottheimer said, as Mullin expressed agreement.
