Both Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) and President Donald Trump have taken bullets for their party and their country. In 2017, a Bernie Sanders-supporting gunman, asked a group of congress members practicing softball if they were Republicans or Democrats, and then opened fire on the GOP team, firing 60 rounds and wounding Scalise. Now, Scalise is calling on the left to tone down the rhetoric around Trump to prevent future assassination attempts because “this is not a game.”
“I really have gotten vocal lately about the rhetoric from the left,” he told the Washington Reporter in an extensive interview. “It’s no longer just this idea that we all need to dial down the rhetoric, because one side has been ratcheting it up very specifically in ways that have now caused two assassination attempts, and it’s time that we confront that fact.”
Scalise sees the recent attempts on Trump’s life as an outgrowth of Democrats’ demonization of Trump. He’s “specifically called for Kamala Harris and other Democrats to stop using terms like threat to democracy, comparisons to Hitler, [Trump] must be stopped,” he said.
When Scalise isn’t taking physical bullets for his party, he’s dodging metaphorical ones as he and the rest of the House GOP leadership navigate everything from keeping the government open to the divisive Kids Online Safety Act.
“Senate Democrats want a government shutdown because they know the mainstream press will just blame Republicans,” he said. Under Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), the Senate has passed “zero” funding bills, he added: “We’ve done our work and they haven’t. At the end of the day, we’re going to keep doing our work. That’s all we can do. I don’t worry anymore about what the mainstream media says, and frankly, most people across America have tuned them out, because you just can’t get straight news any more from them.”
In contrast with the Senate’s slacking, Scalise noted that “we worked really hard, going back to the summer, to pass appropriations bills that would fund the government for the whole year so you don’t have these midnight hour deadlines and threats of government shutdown and short term fixes known as CRs.”
One issue that’s taken seen divisions emerge between House GOP leadership and with committee leadership is the Kids Online Safety Act, which is a legacy item for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.), the retiring chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Scalise isn’t sold on the current version. “There’s some work to be done there to make sure it works properly.” He has concerns about “giving more power to the Biden administration over censorship. We’ve seen in the past, they will use that power not to protect kids online, but to go to conservative organizations, like pro-life groups, and it’s happened before. Why would you give them more unchecked power to go do that again, when they’ve shown that they will use that power?”
“Just because a bill has a nice name, that’s great, but ultimately the policy is what matters,” he said.
The GOP is fully unified in expanding their majority, Scalise, who has spent much of the summer campaigning with Republicans from coast to coast, and he said that he’ll be in districts across America during October. “I’m very confident we’re going to hold the House, but it gives us an opportunity to grow our majority, if we’re really working hard and being successful in those swing districts,” he said.
Scalise is particularly impressed by Nick Begich in Alaska, Rob Bresnahan in Pennsylvania, Austin Theriault in Maine, Tom Barrett in Michigan, and Scott Baugh in California.
Scalise is “very confident” that the GOP will win the House, Senate, and White House — if that happens, he said, “you’ll see our economy back on track, you’ll see inflation immediately start coming down, you’ll see gas prices coming down, [and] we’re going to have energy policy included in that first 100 day agenda.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.), lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
There have been two, that we know of, attempted assassination attempts on President Donald Trump. You are unfortunately also all-too familiar with being a target of political violence from the left. What do you think about this?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
Recent political violence, especially that targets Republicans, and specifically President Trump, has increased dramatically. The fact that you had two assassination attempts on President Trump in just a two month period, and both were barely avoided, is disturbing, and against ought to alarm every American. It shouldn’t be a partisan thing. You’re seeing the media try to minimize it and play it down. Initially they were saying, ‘oh, it was just two people on the street in a shootout.’ Why were they saying that when it wasn’t even close to true? It was one guy in the bushes with the rifle trying to assassinate President Trump. And luckily, it was stopped because a Secret Service agent saw the scope going through the chain link fence. Imagine if he didn’t put the scope through the chain link fence until just 300 yards later. Good luck should not be a strategy to protect the President of the United States. I really have gotten vocal lately about the rhetoric from the left. It’s no longer just this idea that we all need to dial down the rhetoric, because one side has been ratcheting it up very specifically in ways that have now caused two assassination attempts, and it’s time that we confront that fact. You just look a few days ago, Kamala Harris continued this drumbeat that President Trump is a threat to democracy. She’s been saying it for months. She might have taken two days off, three days off, when the first assassination attempt happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, but then she went right back to it. And then you look at some of the social media postings from the attempted assassin from the weekend, and he was regurgitating the very same words about threat to democracy that Kamala Harris is saying. So clearly, what she is saying is a dog whistle to their side to go and take action, and it has to stop. She has to stop saying those words. President Biden said that President Trump needs to be put in a bullseye. Where’s the media outcry for that? You’ve had people taking him up on that offer, trying to kill the president. This is not a game. This is serious. It’s nearly led to the death of not only a former president, but the leading candidate for President of the United States. And so I called for bringing the full level of Secret Service protection to both President Trump and Kamala Harris, the same level that President Biden has. We have a bill in the House on Friday to do just that. But I’ve also specifically called for Kamala Harris and other Democrats to stop using terms like threat to democracy, comparisons to Hitler, he must be stopped. They’ve said worse things. This is becoming a really serious crisis, and just because the media doesn’t cover it the same way doesn’t mean it’s not a major threat to our nation.
Washington Reporter:
Do you feel like your position as someone who, like Trump, literally took a bullet for your party, for your country, is why you’re particularly animated about this?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
Yes. The person who tried to assassinate me was motivated by hypercharged, false rhetoric from the left. He wrote about it, and we know that that type of language does, unfortunately, trigger some people who are unhinged to try to take action into their own hands and try to assassinate people. And nobody should tolerate that, yet it’s still going on. That’s what has to stop.
Washington Reporter:
We have fewer than 50 days until the election. What’s your sense of how things have been looking on the ground? Where were you during recess? Where do you want to be heading between now and Election Day to make sure that you’re not dealing with a majority as small as you’ve had for the past two years?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
Just Monday and Tuesday, I was in three different swing districts, in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And we’ve got a lot of competitive districts. I did a big west coast swing a few weeks ago, hit some Midwestern states too. The whole month of October, I’m going to be nonstop on the road in all of these swing districts. We have about 20 incumbent members who are in really tough races, and about 25 seats that we’re working to flip that are incredibly tight. Those are the areas that I’m going to be spending my time. And we’re spending significant money too, both sides are. That’s where control of the House will be determined. I’m very confident we’re going to hold the House, but it gives us an opportunity to grow our majority, if we’re really working hard and being successful in those swing districts. And that’s where I’ll be.
Washington Reporter:
Take us in the room with you when you’re campaigning; whether it’s in Ohio, Pennsylvania, or the West Coast, is it the same message everywhere across the country?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
It starts off with a very similar message. No matter where I go in the country, border security is by far the number one issue that people are irate about. Then they’re really, really furious about the high cost of things at the grocery store, at the gas station. Those are all a direct result of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s policies, and they know it, but they are ready for a change, and you can see how it’s affecting regular people, just by the reaction you get when you start talking about this. At a lot of the events, I try to take questions and some of the questions are similar, but some might be kind of local and unique, but really a lot of it is about election integrity. You see President Trump put a really strong plan in place, bringing Michael Whatley and Lara Trump to the RNC. People are concerned about the direction of the country. They’re concerned about how it’s affecting them and their communities, and they’ve had enough, so I think that bodes well for our candidates, and the message they’re talking about is very similar, talking about the same blue-collar pocketbook issues.
Washington Reporter:
As you’ve been traveling across the country, have there been particular standout candidates that you’re feeling particularly optimistic about, who you think are going to do a particularly good job once they join you in Congress in January?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
There are so many great candidates that we’ve recruited. Some of the recent ones, are Nick Begich in Alaska, he’s got a really strong background. Obviously we lost there the last two cycles, but we’re going to win it back. Rob Bresnahan in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I went out and did a couple of events for him, and we had huge crowds, very enthusiastic people, in Joe Biden’s back yard of Scranton, and I feel really good about his ability. Austin Theriault up in Maine gives us a great opportunity to flip that seat. He’s working really hard and really smart. And Scott Baugh, in California is in a really strong position to flip a seat out there in the Orange County area of California. You look all around the country, Tom Barrett in Michigan, this is a great candidate, great military background, serves in the state legislature, great family man, and he’s leading right now in a swing district in Michigan, which is, of course, also a swing state. You see that pressure when you’re in Pennsylvania or Michigan or many other swing states, that they know that they have a higher responsibility because of how close it is and how their state will have such an increased impact on the election for president. But they also know that they can also ensure that we hold the House and grow our majority with these great candidates.
Washington Reporter:
Why is it important to you as Majority Leader to have more people in the GOP conference? What does that allow you to get done in 2025, assuming Trump is president, but even if he isn’t president?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
This year, it’s been especially challenging. Today we’re at about a four-seat majority. Some days it’s a three-seat majority with somebody just missing an airplane flight, but we went all the way down for four months to a one-seat majority, which is almost impossible to manage, and yet we’ve still been able to pass our agenda: HR 1, great energy bill, HR 2, great border security bill, HR 5, the Parents’ Bill of Rights, so many other bills. We’re bringing bills just this week, we had China last week, bills this week to stand up to wokeness and anti-semitism. If you’re illegal and you assault a woman, that’s an a deportable offense, increasing security for presidents, getting rid of President Biden and Kamala Harris’s mandate through the EPA that in essence would kill the fossil fuel car industry and go to all these EVs that nobody who wants to buy. And we’ve seen thousands of jobs lost due to their mandate. And John James from Michigan, who’s seen those job losses, has a bill Friday to to reverse that horrible policy. We’re still moving our agenda, but boy, if we had a 10-seat majority, we would be able to get so much more done. We would be able to really move even more of our agenda, because today, three or four people being on the other side of a bill breaks the bill down, and it would be great to have a little bit of a buffer to advance a conservative agenda through the House.
Washington Reporter:
We’re actually doing a story in this edition about how unpopular electric vehicle mandates are. Guess what percent support an EV mandate for consumers in one of the Michigan House districts.
Rep. Steve Scalise:
Twelve percent.
Washington Reporter:
Wow, that’s very close. It’s 8 percent support for an EV mandate on consumers. Eighty-five percent oppose.
Rep. Steve Scalise:
It’s almost impossible for anything to poll that low. When John brought it, I’m said we’ve got to get that on the floor because everybody sees this and hates it, but boy, in Michigan, it’s personal, because they’ve lost thousands of jobs already, and the mandate hasn’t even fully kicked in. Kamala Harris still hasn’t fought to reverse that policy, so clearly she still stands behind her EV mandate that crushes the traditional car industry in states like Michigan.
Washington Reporter:
As you’re thinking about making the case for the GOP in the House and winning the White House, what do you see as your top legislative priorities if you get this expanded majority? Republicans seem to be favored to win the Senate. If Trump also wins, what looks different for someone in suburban Pittsburgh, someone in in Los Angeles, someone in Alaska, if Republicans get that unified control back?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
If we’re able to run the table, and I feel very confident we will, the good news to all of those people who are struggling, is that help is on the way, and we already have a first 100 day plan in place to address the biggest problems facing our country. And I’ve talked to President Trump a lot about this, I was recently at Mar-A-Lago to talk about what that first 100 days would look like. We have to get there, but we will be ready for that moment, and it starts with securing our tax policy, getting rid of some of these crazy regulations that are killing American jobs and dramatically increasing costs on blue-collar workers, middle class workers, realigning the structure of the federal government that’s grown dramatically, especially If you go back to COVID. They jacked up some of these agencies, 20 percent, 30 percent, during COVID, and those numbers need to come back down. And these agencies are out there going after small businesses. They doubled the size of the IRS, which, by the way, was a vote that was so close that Kamala Harris had to break the tie. Thousands of IRS agents are going after waiters and waitresses who make tip money. So when Kamala says she wants to get rid of the tax on tips, remember that she cast the deciding vote to sic over 10,000 new IRS agents on the very waiters and waitresses who are making tip money, to try to force them to pay more in taxes. Clearly there’s no sincerity in her claim there, because most people are being hammered right now by the IRS agents that Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote to grow. Those are the kind of things that we can do in the first 100 days where you’ll see our economy back on track, you’ll see inflation immediately start coming down, you’ll see gas prices coming down, we’re going to have energy policy included in that first 100 day agenda. Nobody knows better than President Trump how to lower energy costs because were less than $2 a gallon, when he was president, and then we’re going to be securing the border with President Trump. He can do a lot through executive order, but the things he can’t do, like more money to the border wall, more technology, we can do all of that in the first 100 days to secure the American border once again.
Washington Reporter:
Before you can get to all of that, there’s this whole government funding situation, how do you see this resolving, and does that align with how you think it should resolve?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
We worked really hard, going back to the summer, to pass appropriations bills that would fund the government for the whole year so you don’t have these midnight hour deadlines and threats of government shutdown and short term fixes known as CRs. And we passed over 70 percent of government funding out of the House, and the Senate still to this day has not passed a single bill. Zero. That’s unacceptable. The Senate needs to start doing their job, but it’s embarrassing that you’re literally a week away from the deadline for government funding and the Senate still hasn’t passed a single appropriations bill through their body when we passed over 70 percent through the House, and they’ve had those bills since July, in some cases, since April and May. And yet, they refuse to do any work. That’s a that’s a failure of Chuck Schumer’s Senate that literally has brought America to the brink of a government shutdown because they don’t want to actually do their job.
Washington Reporter:
Why, then, are Republicans always blamed?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
This is a playbook we’ve seen for decades: the Senate refuses to do any work, the House passes the bills over there, and then the media blames Republicans for anything that might go wrong, and the Senate knows this. That’s why they will just sit back and not even start a negotiation, because it’s almost like the Senate Democrats want a government shutdown because they know the mainstream press will just blame Republicans. We’ve done our work and they haven’t. At the end of the day, we’re going to keep doing our work. That’s all we can do. I don’t worry anymore about what the mainstream media says, and frankly, most people across America have tuned them out, because you just can’t get straight news any more from them. And that’s sad, but it’s also given people the opportunity to go find other places to get their information, which is healthy.
Washington Reporter:
The House GOP leadership is potentially at odds with the Energy and Commerce Committee’s GOP leadership on the Kids Online Safety Act. What do you make of that potential disconnect between your priorities and their priorities?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
There’s still some real concerns being expressed by a lot of members and others with some of the details of the bill. And of course, the details matter, especially when you’re giving more power to the Biden administration over censorship. We’ve seen in the past, they will use that power not to protect kids online, but to go to conservative organizations, like pro-life groups, and it’s happened before. Why would you give them more unchecked power to go do that again, when they’ve shown that they will use that power? I want to protect kids online. We really worked hard and came together, and I thought Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers did a phenomenal job marshaling the TikTok bill through her committee, which was very hard to get through the process. I brought it to the floor the week after she passed it, because we were working very closely together. And I told her, we don’t want to lose momentum. I brought the bill the next week, and we had an overwhelming vote, which I think shocked a lot of people, and it ultimately got signed into law by Joe Biden, and that’s an example of how we have worked together in the past to protect kids from having their data stolen. Over 100 million people in America, mostly kids, are at jeopardy of having their data stolen by TikTok. We’ve now addressed it. It’s in the courts, and we’re going to win there, but we worked really, really hard to come together and do that. A little more needs to be done to make sure the policy is right on KOSA. Just because a bill has a nice name, that’s great, but ultimately the policy is what matters. And then there’s some work to be done there to make sure it works properly.
Washington Reporter:
We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attacks, and Kamala Harris, this week, was reiterating support for conditioning aid to Israel. Hamas just executed an American citizen after holding him hostage for almost a year. What are House Republicans doing on and around that anniversary to make the case that Democrats are unreliable allies, whether it’s Israel or with the people in Afghanistan who we abandoned?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
Since October 7th, House Republicans quickly united to show our strong support, not just for Israel’s right to defend itself, but also for their right to win this war. Their leadership came together, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came and addressed the joint session of Congress and laid out incredibly clearly how this all came to be, who started this, and why it’s so important that they win, so that Israel is no longer at risk of being eviscerated from the planet. And Kamala Harris deliberately boycotted the speech; she normally, as vice president, sits right behind the leader of any country that comes to address Congress, and for whatever reason, this time, she chose to boycott it. I think it shows a consistent pattern of Kamala Harris and her party walking away from Israel, which is disturbing. It’s a long history noted by a lot of people across the country. Even if the Democrats continue this abandonment of Israel, we are going to stand strongly behind them. They need support; there are countries that want to see Israel go away. The BDS movement, we have a bill this week to stand up to the BDS movement that’s continuing to grow. We have bills to stand up to anti-Semitism, which is alarming and growing all across the country, especially on college campuses, where we pointed out with House hearings how some of these failed college presidents won’t even protect their own Jewish students in violation of their own policies. I think America started taking note. They were alarmed as well, and it’s highlighted the problem. But we’re going to continue to stand with Israel, and we’re going to continue exposing all of the anti-Semitism and the anti-Israel activity that’s coming from the left, because we cannot have a repeat of what happened in the lead up to the conclusion of World War Two, where people just looked the other way, and we saw the devastation that came from that attitude.
Washington Reporter:
How do you see Republicans in Congress ensuring that our military remains ready to take on China, and remain technologically superior to China, and that the CCP isn’t stealing that technology?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
Sadly, we’ve seen the Biden-Harris administration take a blind eye towards China’s threats. They’ve been more aggressive, ramping up their military, trying to hurt us economically, continuing to cause mischief, and creating a new Axis of Evil between China, Russia and Iran. That’s a very recent and dangerous alliance that President Biden and Kamala Harris have just ignored. When President Trump was in office, you didn’t have all of that unrest around the world. And today, you see the world on fire with no response from the Biden-Harris administration, the failed debacle in Afghanistan that they still doubled down on, and say they’d do it again, which shows how out of touch they are, and how incapable they are of being the Commander in Chief. President Trump was a strong leader and our allies knew President Trump would have their back, and we’ve got to get back to that, and I’m confident that we will.
Washington Reporter:
Finally, what do you make of the Democrats’ pitch on Kamalanomics?
Rep. Steve Scalise:
Look at what they’re trying to do with unrealized capital gains, how would that even work? It would devastate stock market. The Wall Street Journal has been covering that incredibly well. They keep throwing this stuff out there. It’s what they want to do, Kamala wants to raise taxes, it’s what she’s always wanted to do. Her values haven’t changed. This is what she’s always stood for, and it would devastate middle-income and low-income families the most, just like their higher prices, the inflation they caused, the higher interest rates, the higher gas prices, it hits low-income people the most.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Scalise, thanks so much for talking today. Please do not fund the government before we post this story!
Rep. Steve Scalise:
We will not.