Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has threatened to leave the Republican Party over the nomination of Donald Trump.
Murkowski, who has long sought to undermine Trump and the wider conservative agenda, bemoaned the fact that he was once again the party’s nominee.
“I wish that as Republicans, we had … a nominee that I could get behind,” Murkowski said in an interview with CNN. “I certainly can’t get behind Donald Trump.”
When asked whether she would consider leaving the GOP and becoming an independent, Murkowski suggested that she might.
“Oh, I think I’m very independent minded,” she said. “I just regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.”
When pressed on what this mean, she responded: “I am navigating my way through some very interesting political times. Let’s just leave it at that.”
Having refused to support Trump in both 2016 and 2020, Murkowski to undermine key parts of his agenda by voting, including voting against the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over fabricated allegations of sexual assault. In 2022, she voted for Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Murkowski was also one of seven Republican Senators to vote to convict Trump for his supposed role in the January 6th protests and vehemently dismissed mountains of evidence that the election was tainted by widespread election fraud.
“The facts make clear that the violence and desecration of the Capitol that we saw on January 6 was not a spontaneous uprising. President Trump had set the stage months before the 2020 election by stating repeatedly that the election was rigged, casting doubt into the minds of the American people about the fairness of the election,” she argued at the time.
Despite being wildly unpopular among Alaska Republicans, Murkowski managed to hold on to her seat at the most recent election because of a ranked choice voting system in which Democrats supported.
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