Your absence was definitely felt at Munich this year and some of your colleagues in the CODEL were saying, “He can’t come, he has a primary fight.” Your challenger, Jared Lovelace, whom you bested in the end, talked in his campaign about foreign entanglements and America First. Does that resonate in your district?
Yeah, some. I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base. And I have to explain to them what’s at stake, why Ukraine is in our national security interest. By the way, you don’t like Communist China? Well, guess what? They’re aligned [with Russia], along with the Ayatollah. So when you explain it that way, they kind of start understanding it. And unlike 1939, we want to provide deterrence so that we don’t have to send anyone over, and we don’t want Article V invoked. Because the next thing the Russians will do is [attack] Moldova, Georgia, and then part of the Baltics. Or at least provoke a lot. So I just think it’s preventative.
This war is so personal for me, and probably because of that, I just have a really hard time understanding why Ukraine is such an unpopular issue on the right. Do you understand it?
Yeah, I don’t understand it! I grew up with this construct of Ronald Reagan, and I tell my constituents: “What would Reagan do?” Well, he believed in leading the free world. He believed in a strong NATO. He didn’t attack NATO. You know, the fact that Finland and Sweden are now part of NATO is phenomenal. And I visited both those countries; they have a lot to offer. But I don’t know if it’s some of that impeachment stuff that came out of Ukraine, maybe that’s part of it. Or they just think it’s corrupt and they think we’re throwing money in a black hole.