Former U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine said Saturday that President Donald Trump should resign to prepare for the administration of President-elect Joe Biden after a large group of outgoing president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
The 73-year-old Republican has kept a relatively low political profile since she left the Senate in 2013 months after announcing her retirement months earlier in a surprise move that upended Maine politics. U.S. Sen. Angus King, an independent, won the race to succeed the moderate.
“President Trump should resign from office now to allow our nation to begin to heal and prepare for the transition to the Biden presidency,” she said in a Saturday tweet.
Only a handful of prominent Republicans have called for Trump to resign or be removed. They include Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Govs. Larry Hogan and Phil Scott of Maryland and Vermont, respectively. Former Maine Sen. Bill Cohen, who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, said Trump’s Cabinet should remove him after the insurrection.
Snowe has only criticized the president sparingly in the past, telling a columnist in 2016 that Trump’s style of politics “absolutely is hurting our brand” and could lead to long-lasting and “tragic” negative effects on the Republican Party.
The president’s 2020 campaign referenced that remark in October when it charged the Commission on Presidential Debates — which Snowe sat on — with bias as it debated allowing moderators to cut the microphones of candidates after an initial debate in which Trump often interrupted Biden. The campaign called the panel controlling the debates “swamp monsters.”