Not Right Now’: Republicans and the Art of Not Talking About Trump



WASHINGTON — Haven’t seen it. Couldn’t tell you. Ask my office.

Congressional Republicans, well practiced by now in the craft of protecting an administration stalked by scandal, generally retreated to form on Tuesday when confronted with the extraordinary latest: an email last year, embraced by the president’s son, affirming the Russian government’s support for the Trump campaign and promising damaging information on his opponent.

The developments instantly roused a Capitol that can occasionally feel numb to Trump-size interruptions, jolting the overlapping investigations into ties between President Trump’s team and Russia and leaving Republican lawmakers to answer once more for the executive tumult that has shadowed the legislative year.

Even by the funhouse-mirror standards of Mr. Trump’s Washington, the stakes on Tuesday seemed to escalate in earnest, with some Democrats lurching more willingly toward words like “collusion” and even “treason.”

Yet the response from Republicans, at least initially, followed a familiar pattern: Approached for comment about Donald Trump Jr.’s email exchange and meeting, most senators declined to engage, expressed confusion about the questions or searched for plausible justifications for the conduct.

“Not right now,” Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania said.

“Talk to others about politics,” said Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, typically more willing than most Republicans to tweak the administration.

“He’s a very nice young man,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah said of the president’s son, insisting that he was simply “very dedicated to his father” and suggesting that the controversy “could be way overblown.”

The senator added that, in fact, it spoke well of the president that his children loved him so much even though “he divorced their mothers.”

Mr. Hatch was asked if he would have taken a meeting with someone who emailed promising Russian support and incriminating evidence during a campaign. He laughed.

“No,” he said.

Some of the most forceful Republican scolding came from a familiar duo: Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. They are often the likeliest to criticize the president on matters of Russia, though they, too, have remained broadly supportive of his administration and its agenda.

“They’re problematic on its face,” Mr. Graham said of the email and the meeting. “If you’re ever approached about getting help from a foreign government, the answer is no.”

Mr. McCain, calling the Russia affair “a classic scandal” far from its end, returned to a favored foreboding prediction: “There will be more shoes that will drop.”

He was asked if he was confident that there was no collusion.

“I’m not confident of anything,” he said. “More shoes will drop.”


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