'There should be a line we draw': GOP congressman says Trump has no 'moral clarity'

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the press prior to boarding Air Force One at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S., August 3, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

U.S. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) blasted President Donald Trump and his administration, decrying a lack of “moral clarity” from the White House while denouncing the “populist” President as “not unifying.”

Congressman Bacon said “absolutely” that President Trump should tone down his rhetoric.

“He’s a populist. He centers on anger and opposition. That’s what he does. But he had a chance to be more Ronald Reagan and try to unify both sides on this,” Bacon said of the Charlie Kirk assassination. “It would be one thing that was old Republicans being murdered, but it’s not.”

He also said he hopes the Trump makeover of the Republican Party is “not a permanent remaking.”

Hate Speech and Threatening the Media

“There have been some wrong statements made, to say the least. When Attorney General [Bondi] said that they were gonna go after hate speech — she backed off of that. But it was wrong,” Congressman Bacon, who is retiring at the end of his term, told CNN’s Manu Raju on Monday. “And I think the president doing threats against media is also wrong. We don’t threaten the media.”

“To threaten media, and so you’re gonna pull their license, that’s not what America’s about. And we do have a freedom of speech, freedom of the press. We should defend that.”

“We have to acknowledge, Republicans and Democrats have been murdered in the last year. And someone tried to burn the house down of the governor of Pennsylvania — wasn’t a guy from the right, it was a antisemitic guy, going after Governor Shapiro, because he’s Jewish.”

“From the White House, we’re hearing, this is just a liberal problem,” Raju said.

“That’s… Not very unifying,” Bacon said. “I don’t think it’s accurate, for one, and it’s not unifying. He had the opportunity here to say, to acknowledge a couple of Democrats were murdered in Minneapolis. Right? By a guy who called himself pro-life. We don’t really know his motive, but still, he surely was more on the conservative side, it seems, from what we know.”

“I do think that we, as officeholders, though, should there should be a line we draw.”

Bacon denounced both Democrats and Republicans using extremist words to characterize each other.

“My point is, we’ve overdone it,” he said, while warning that “there’s a small part of our population that, yeah, they take it serious, and they’re radicalized. So I think we owe ourselves better at how we treat each other.”

Tariffs

“I think he is, by far,” overreaching on tariffs, Bacon continued.

“Article I of the Constitution clearly gives us, the Congress,” he said, power over tariffs.

“Iowa and Nebraska are really struggling right now with our farm economy. We are not growing markets for corn and soybeans. The president’s making trade deals, but not a single country that I can see has bought more corn soybeans. That’s what we really need right now.”

Russia

“Reagan stood up to Gorbachev,” Bacon said of the late GOP and Soviet Union Presidents.

“I don’t I don’t see the moral clarity right now out of the White House. Ronald Reagan had moral clarity.”

“Now, he also was willing to negotiate and try to lower the tensions, but he knew that communism was evil, and he, and he, it was clear that he stood steadfast with our NATO allies. And the president sends out such mixed messages on NATO, and totally moral, ambiguous messages about Ukraine and Russia.”

When asked about the President’s “moral character,” Bacon refused to answer directly.

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