PEA RIDGE -- President Donald Trump's election in November was "a bloodless coup d'etat," supporter and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told a capacity crowd of 350 at the annual Benton County Republican Lincoln-Reagan Day fundraising dinner.
"What happened in November was nothing less than a bloodless coup d'etat, with ballots instead of bullets," Huckabee told the crowd in the Pea Ridge High School auditorium. Voters were frustrated by an unresponsive government that ignored their needs and blamed both major political parties, he said. "They wanted a disruptor to be president and not another conventional politician. Saying Donald Trump's not a conventional politician is the understatement of the year."
Arkansas' two most recent Republican governors, including the current one, spoke at the dinner. Gov. Asa Hutchinson spoke before Huckabee. Both first lady Susan Hutchinson and former first lady Janet Huckabee also attended. Several area legislators also attended although several couldn't make it from Little Rock, where the Legislature is in session.
Huckabee, who was a candidate for president in 2016, said voter insistence on change was clear on the campaign trail. "The seething rage was so very obvious," he said.
Although the literal meaning of coup d'etat is a sudden, violent and illegal seizure of power, Huckabee made in clear in his speech the election result wasn't improper in any way. Trump was elected precisely because the nation was fed up with government cruising along in the same path for years.
Tyler Clark, Washington County chairman of the Democratic Party, said Huckabee's language is proving appropriate. "If that's what they want, that's what they're getting, government by secrecy and by Twitter," he said.
Hutchinson also praised Trump, saying when people ask if this is a "tumultuous time, I say 'What did you expect?'"
Trump has done what he said he would do, both Hutchinson and Huckabee said. Both in particular praised the president's choice of Neil Gorsuch, a federal appellate judge from Colorado, for the U.S. Supreme Court.
The two governors arrived by plane in Northwest Arkansas for the event, and talked about the contrast between their terms as governor on the way, Hutchinson said. Huckabee served as governor from 1996 to 2007. He was the state's only Republican statewide elected official at the time of his election as lieutenant governor in 1992, and there were 11 Republican members of the 100-member state House during his first term as governor. Hutchinson has three-quarter Republican majorities in both Houses.
Huckabee gave Hutchinson much of the credit for turning the state "bright red," he said, during Hutchinson's term as state party co-chairman in the early 1990s. Hutchinson started much of the grassroots organization the grew into the party's statewide dominance today, Huckabee said.
NW News on 02/02/2017