Sen. John Barrasso Completely Fumbles When Confronted on Trump’s Defense of ‘Hang Mike Pence’ Chants

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) dithered about as he refused to explicitly condemn former President Donald Trump for defending his supporters over their murderous intent to hang former Vice President Mike Pence.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interviewed Barrasso on Sunday for This Week when he brought up the audio Jonathan Karl obtained while interviewing Trump for his upcoming book: Betrayal. In the audio, Trump exhibited a shocking disregard for the threat to the ex-VP’s life posed by his supporters who chanted “hang Mike Pence” while storming the U.S. Capitol.

Since Trump claimed that the threatening chants were grounded in “common sense,” Stephanopoulos asked Barrasso, “Can your party tolerate a leader who defends murderous chants against his own vice president?”

Barrasso responded with a deflection:

Let me just say the Republican Party is incredibly united right now. And it’s because of the policies of this administration. And I think the more that the Democrats and the press becomes obsessed with President Trump, I think the better it is for the Republican Party…

Stephanopoulos stayed on target with his question, asking again, “So you have no problem with the president saying ‘Hang Mike Pence’ is ‘common sense?'”

Again, Barrasso squirmed away from the actual question.

I was with Mike Pence in the Senate chamber during January 6th, and what happened was they quickly got Vice President Pence out of there certainly a lot faster than they removed the senators. I believed he was safe the whole time. I didn’t hear any of those chants. I don’t believe that he did either.

Stephanopoulos noted that ABC just played the audio from the chants, and he asked once more if Barrasso can tolerate Trump calling them “common sense.”

Here’s how the rest of the conversation played out:

Barrasso: “It’s not common sense. There are issues every election. I voted to certify the election. What we’ve seen on this election, there are areas that needed to be looked into like what we saw in Pennsylvania. We all want free and fair elections, that’s where we need to go for the future.”

Stephanopoulos: “But you’re not going to criticize President Trump for those views?”

Barrasso: “I don’t agree with President Trump on everything. I agree with him on the policies that have brought us the best economy in my lifetime and I’m going to continue to support those policies and continuing to work to stop what Joe Biden is doing to this country, which I believe is almost irreversibly bad.”

Watch above, via ABC.