Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, recommended Sunday that GOP front-runner Donald Trump might go further in the presidential race if he focuses on winning over Americans instead of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I’m glad he’s making friends with Putin,” she said on CNN. “I think that he would be better off making friends with Americans.”
Trump last week received something like an endorsement from Putin, who said Trump was “bright and talented.” While many Republicans noted that Putin has killed reporters and crushed his political opposition, Trump returned the favor by saying “at least he’s a leader.” The remark raised more questions about whether Trump is the right choice for Republicans who consider Putin a thug.
Love, the popular freshman who’s the first black Republican woman ever to be elected to Congress, has endorsed Marco Rubio for president. Rubio has called Putin a “gangster.”
Rubio also breaks with Trump on immigration, and on Sunday, Love took an indirect shot at Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigrants. Immigration should be “something that unites us,” Love said.
“For the past several years, it’s been a wedge between all of us, on both sides of the aisle and within the party,” she said. “What immigration means to me and what it means to many other Americans are people like my parents who came here, who said the most wonderful day of their life was when they became U.S. citizens.”
“They studied their American history, they studied the Constitution, they learned how to speak English,” Love added. “And when they pledge their allegiance to the American flag for the first time, they knew exactly what they were saying, they knew what it meant, and they meant every word of it.”
