Former Illinois Representative Joe
Walsh on Sunday announced that he would challenge President Donald
Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
Walsh, a former vocal supporter of
Trump during the 2016 election cycle, said that Trump was unfit for
the office and should be denied a second term.
During an appearance on ABC's This
Week, Walsh – who has a history of using racist slurs and has
promoted the “birther” conspiracy during former President Barack
Obama's tenure – told George Stephanopoulos that he regretted his
past comments.
“We have a guy in the White House
who’s never apologized for anything he’s done or said. I think
it’s a weakness not to apologize," Walsh told Stephanopoulos.
"I helped create Trump, there’s no doubt about that. The
personal, ugly politics, I regret that and I’m sorry for that. And
now we’ve got a guy in the White House, George, that’s all he
does.”
Walsh, however, did not address his
vocal opposition to LGBT rights, including marriage equality.
“I'm a strong supporter of
traditional marriage and believe that a marriage can only exist
between one man and one woman,” he pledged during his 2010
campaign.
In a 2015 tweet, Walsh wrote: “I told
Thomas Jefferson that the government was forcing a grandmother to
arrange flowers for a gay wedding. He said, 'Grab your Musket!!!'”
In that same year, he said that he
carried his gun everywhere, pointing out that “if a bakery can't
say no to your gay wedding it can't say no to my gun.”
In a tweet last year promoting a CNN
story about a transgender man, Walsh insisted that “a transgender
'man' is a woman.”
During his time in office, Walsh, also
a conservative talk radio host, scored zero on the Human Rights
Campaign's (HRC) Congressional Scorecard, a measure of a lawmaker's
support for LGBT rights.