Donald Trump has taunted a defeated Republican candidate that he had endorsed for a US Senate seat.
Conspiracy theorist Don Bolduc, a retired US Army General, was beaten by incumbent Maggie Hassan for New Hampshire’s Senate seat.
Mr Trump showed no sympathy for his chosen candidate when he took to Truth Social on Tuesday night and mocked him for not pushing the one-term president’s 2020 election “Big Lie” hard enough.
“Don Bolduc was a very nice guy, but he lost tonight when he disavowed, after his big primary win, his longstanding stance on Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Primary. Had he stayed strong and true, he would have won, easily. Lessons Learned!!!” wrote a seemingly unimpressed Mr Trump.
Mr Bolduc had attracted attention in the closing weeks of the campaign for repeating a well-debunked hoax regarding children being permitted to relieve themselves in litter boxes by public school officials, who were supposedly indulging the non-existent children’s decision to “identify as cats.”
“They’re putting litter boxes,” Mr Bolduc said in an audio recording shared by CNN before the election.
“These are the same people that are concerned about spreading germs. Yet they let children lick themselves and then touch everything. And they’re starting to lick each other.”
He also described the state’s popular Republican Governor Chris Sununu as a “Chinese Communist sympathizer”, while Mr Sununu branded him a “conspiracy-theory extremist.”