GOP rep says Republicans have ‘no other option’ than to back Trump

Republican Rep. Peter Meijer (Mich.) on Sunday said the GOP has “no other option” than to back former President Trump, pointing to the actions of the Biden administration in its first year.

During an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host Chuck Todd cited Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol briefly broke from Trump during a speech on the Senate floor, saying, “Enough is enough.”

“In the words of Lindsey Graham, ‘Enough is enough.’ I’m out of here, right? I’m done with this. The party is going to move on. Trump’s gonna be left behind. Boy, did that not happen. Why do you think that didn’t happen?” Todd asked Meijer.

Meijer, who was one of 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment following the Capitol attack, said, “There was no alternative. There was no other path.”

He pointed to the party’s pair of losses in the Georgia Senate runoff races and actions taken by President Biden during his first year in office.

“Given how President Biden, when he was elected into office, you know, said he would be moderate and look for bipartisan solutions. But then after, and, frankly, I blame the former president for this, after we lost the two Senate seats in Georgia and the Senate flipped, it became an exercise in trying to be an LBJ- or FDR-style presidency and enact transformational change in the absence of any compelling mandate from the American people to do so,” Meijer said.

“So that gave the rallying signal. That created a very steep divide. And at the end of the day, there’s no other option right now in the Republican Party,” he added.

WATCH: After January 6th, Republicans like Lindsey Graham said “enough is enough” when it came to Trump. So why are Republicans still backing the former president?@RepMeijer: “At the end of the day, there’s no other option right now in the Republican Party.” pic.twitter.com/OnUazUWu6d

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 2, 2022

Pressed by Todd on why Republicans “can’t seem to kick their Trump habit” and why it is not the responsibility of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Meijer cited the stark polarization between the two parties.

“We have a two-party system. And in the best-case scenario, each party challenges the other to do better, to be better, to have a scenario where iron sharpens iron,” Meijer said.

“Instead, if you have one party plumbing to the depths and the other just use that excuse to go further, to go more to an extreme, to go more away from any sort of governing consensus and towards trying to enact whatever the will of the most extreme constituency they have is, you know, that is a recipe for both parties to drive further away from anything that resembles serving the American people as a whole,” he added.

Trump endorsed Meijer’s challenger, former Housing and Urban Development official John Gibbs, in the midterm House election. Gibbs is mounting a primary race against Meijer.