Idaho’s Rep. Mike Simpson has sharp words for Trump administration

Amid the health care tug-of-war, Russian investigation drama and other assorted Trump administration happenings, this terse nugget appeared in Politico on Thursday:

“I don’t even pay any attention to what is going on with the administration because I don’t care. They’re a distraction. The family is a distraction, the president is a distraction,” complained Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho). “At first, it was ‘Well yeah, this is the guy we elected. He’ll learn, he’ll learn.’ And you just don’t see that happening.”

Simpson went on to say more, according to a tweet from Politico’s John Bresnahan.

This is not the first time Simpson — who represents Idaho’s 2nd Congressional District, including most of Boise and everything in Idaho to the east — has been critical of President Trump.

In May, Idaho’s senior congressman told reporters in Washington he’d believe fired FBI Director James Comey over President Donald Trump and said he was concerned Republicans weren’t getting ahead of a potential crisis similar to Watergate.

“What I’m worried about is, in the early 1970s, politicians like me were standing around saying, ‘Nixon’s okay, he didn’t do anything,’ and look what it led to,” Simpson said in remarks reported by the Washington Post. “And every day there is something that adds on to it.”

In October, after a video showed Trump talking about sexually assaulting women, Simpson said he would not vote for Trump: “While I’ve never endorsed Donald Trump, I find his recent comments about women deplorable. In my opinion, he has demonstrated that he is unfit to be president and I cannot support him.”

This story was originally published July 21, 2017 at 11:48 AM with the headline "Idaho’s Rep. Mike Simpson has sharp words for Trump administration."