CNN host Jake Tapper pressed Amy McGrath, who announced plans to challenge Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for his Kentucky Senate seat, to defend past comments comparing President Trump’s 2016 victory to Sept. 11.
“Won’t that undermine the pitch, you think?” Tapper said in regards to McGrath claiming she understands why Kentuckians voted for Trump.
“Well, what I was talking about was the fact that, you know, nobody really expected President Trump to win. And I was talking also about the entire 2016 cycle,” McGrath explained.
“Many of us were spurred into action by what happened in 2016, the labeling of each other as, ‘They’re all Communist or they’re all this or they’re all that.’ And the fake news, the divisiveness of our country was something I had never seen before. My husband is a Republican. I’m a Democrat. We took stock of that after the election and we said, ‘Where are we as a country?’ And that way it was the same thing for me was looking at that tragic event in taking stock of: ‘Where are we as a country?’ So that’s what I was saying, and I can see why, you know, folks might be upset about that. But that is what I was saying.”
McGrath announced Tuesday that she would be running against McConnell for his Senate seat in 2020. In her announcement video, McGrath appeared to position herself as a moderate Democrat, but the McConnell campaign pointed to comments from 2017 to say that she was not as moderate as she claimed.
“And that morning I woke up like somebody had sucker-punched me,” McGrath said about the day after the 2016 election. “I felt like, ‘What has just happened to my country?’ The only feeling I can describe that’s any close to it was the feeling I had after 9/11.”
In 2018, McGrath ran unsuccessfully against Republican Rep. Andy Barr for Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District in a highly publicized race.
