Far-right Republican lawmaker Paul Gosar has deleted a tweet indicating his support for former President Donald Trump’s proposal that the United States terminate its constitution.
Mr Gosar was initially supportive of Mr Trump’s insistence that the Constitution be terminated because Twitter limited the reach of the Hunter Biden “scandal” during the closing stretch of the 2020 presidential election campaign.
“I support and agree with the former President. Unprecedented fraud requires unprecedented cure,” the congressman wrote on Wednesday, attaching a screenshot of the Truth Social post in which Mr Trump complained that the suppression of the story about Joe Biden’s son on Twitter was grounds to revoke the Constitution.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Mr Trump wrote in his initial post.
Mr Gosar then deleted the tweet — and he’s not the only person backtracking on the notion that the Constitution should be “terminated” because Mr Trump lost the 2020 election.
Mr Trump himself, again a candidate for president, also retreated from his initial position in several follow-up posts on Truth Social written on Monday.
“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, and all of their other HOAXES & SCAMS,” Mr Trump wrote.
A number of prominent Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence and members of the US Senate and House, rejected Mr Trump’s suggestion about the fate of the Constitution out of hand. The White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates made a statement condemning Mr Trump’s proposal as well.
It is not clear what motivated Mr Gosar, one of the most far-right members of Congress, to delete his tweet. The Arizonan voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election last year and then was censured and stripped of his committee assignments for posting an anime clip on social media that depicted him killing a character with Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s face.
Mr Gosar also reportedly has ties to a number of violent far-right organisations like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. He allegedly attended two Oath Keepers meetings roughly a year apart and also delivered the keynote address at a conference hosted by the white supremacist Nick Fuentes last year.
