Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins said she won’t endorse GOP presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump until he starts behaving more “presidential.”
“I would love to be able to endorse Donald Trump, but he really has to change the approach that he’s taken,” she told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday on “New Day.” “If I were giving him advice, I would tell him he should own up to making mistakes. He should apologize to the judge and to the American people. And he should stop insulting people.”
Multiple Republican leaders have criticized Trump for comments he made suggesting that Latino and Muslim judges could not rule fairly because of their ethnicity and religion.
Trump on Tuesday said Republicans who are critical of his comments against a federal judge with Mexican heritage “have to get over it” and “they shouldn’t be so angry for so long.”
“Some of the Republicans — and in all fairness, they’re some of the people that I went through war with, and I won, and there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of anxiety there,” he said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
But Collins said if Trump begins to speak and behave more like a president, he’ll attract more support for his presidency.
“He is the one who needs to start acting more presidential and articulate more clearly what a Trump presidency would look like,” she said. “So frankly, I really think the burden is on him to put forward a far more positive message.”