Bob Dole: ‘I’m a Trumper’ but ‘I’m sort of Trumped out’

Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole (Kan.) told USA Today in an interview that “I’m a Trumper,” before adding later that “I’m sort of Trumped out, though.”

Dole, the former Senate majority leader and Republican candidate for president in 1996, was one of the few individuals from the GOP establishment to endorse Trump in 2016, and was the only former presidential nominee to go to the convention that nominated him.

While he said he is still a “Trumper,” he did break from the former president on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, telling USA Today “he lost the election.”

“He lost the election, and I regret that he did, but they did,” Dole said. “He had Rudy Giuliani running all over the country, claiming fraud. He never had one bit of fraud in all those lawsuits he filed and statements he made.”

Dole also weighed in on the current state of politics and U.S. democracy, concluding that “we’re just not quite where we should be.”

“I don’t like to second-guess, but I do believe we’ve lost something,” he told USA Today. “I can’t get my hand on it, but we’re just not quite where we should be, as the greatest democracy in the world. And I don’t know how you correct it, but I keep hoping that there will be a change in my lifetime.”

The former Republican leader also offered his thoughts on President Biden, who visited him in February following his cancer diagnosis. The two men served in the Senate together from 1973 until 1996.

Dole said Biden is “a great, kind, upstanding, decent person.”

Dole, now 98 years old, announced in February that he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. He was initially undergoing chemotherapy, which he said was “about to kill me,” but is now receiving immunotherapy instead, USA Today reported.