On Tuesday, speaking to Joe Scarborough and his “Morning Joe” panel on MSNBC, Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan made a dramatic statement regarding how he wants to deal with members of the Republican Party he regards as “extremist.”
“We’ve got to kill and confront that movement,” Ryan said of a group he termed “the extremists that we’re dealing with every single day,” strongly implying he meant supporters of former President Donald Trump, or the “Make America Great Again” [MAGA] movement. The candidate, a who represents Ohio’s 13th district in the U.S. House of Representatives, faces attorney, author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance – an outspoken MAGA candidate – in the November election.
The two candidates have struggled for the upper hand throughout the campaign. Scarborough and his colleagues opened the segment noting a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll showing Ryan with 47 percent of the vote, one point ahead of Vance.
Ryan’s suggestion about his opponents contrasted with other statements he made in the MSNBC interview that seemed phrased to make him sound moderate and accommodating.
“I want to work across the aisle,” he said in the run-up to his call for confrontation. “Look, the Democrats aren’t right on everything and I’m willing to sit down and have conversations about how we can move out of this age of stupidity and into an age of reconciliation and reform – how do we fix all of these broken systems?”
The congressman did not mention any issues on which he has broken with his own party and now sides with the GOP. (He was pro-life early in his congressional career but now solidly supports abortion.) In the nearly 90 congressional votes examined by the data-aggregation website FiveThirtyEight, Ryan has backed the preferred position of President Joe Biden 100 percent of the time.
William Martin, Vance’s deputy communications director, denounced Ryan’s comment in an online statement.
“Tim Ryan wants to ‘kill and confront’ the MAGA movement,” Martin wrote. “This guy is a left-wing extremist who belongs nowhere near the Senate.”
Republican activists and movement conservatives also castigated the Democrat for his “kill and confront” declaration.
“Where is the outrage over this call to violence!” Scott M. Feigelstein, a regional director for the Republican Jewish Coalition in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, wrote in a Twitter post response to Ryan’s assertion.
Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak was similarly astounded.
“Who, exactly, is the extremist?” he tweeted.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Ohio Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Tim Ryan” by Tim Ryan.
