Senator Lisa Murkowski, the moderate republican of Alaska who regularly broke with her party to criticize President Trump, made a surprising admission on the reality of serving in the public service at a time when a chief not linked to the oval office is determined to resume against her political enemies.
“We are all afraid,” Ms. Murkowski said, speaking at a conference in Anchorage on Monday. After stopping for about five seconds, she admitted: “This is a whole declaration. But we are in a time and a place where I have certainly not been here before. I will tell you that I am often very anxious of the use of my voice, because the reprisals are real. And that’s not true. “
Ms. Murkowski’s comments were first reported by the Anchorage Daily News.
Ms. Murkowski, an independent voice in an increasingly tribal party, was the rare republican in Capitol Hill ready to criticize the Trump administration. After Mr. Trump reprimanded President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine, in the Oval Office, she warned that the United States “was moving away from our allies.”
She regularly criticized the government’s Ministry of Efficiency for creating an “enormous amount of unnecessary anxiety” and to dismiss federal workers in her state. And Ms. Murkowski was one of the three Republicans to have voted so as not to confirm the defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
Ms. Murkowski has become more frank in Mr. Trump’s second term, but she has long been part of a small minority in her party willing to resist her leader at a time when most of the GOP legislators have chosen to queue. She was one of the Seven Republicans who voted in 2021 to condemn Mr. Trump during his second dismissal trial, and the only one to be re -elected at the time. She was also one of the three Republicans who voted to support the confirmation of judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at the Supreme Court.
Ms. Murkowski was frank on her discomfort in a party led by Mr. Trump, whom she said that she had refused to vote for last year; Ms. Murkowski approved former Governor Nikki Haley from South Carolina for the President. At the time, Ms. Murkowski even planned to leave the party completely, although she did not do it.
“I just regret that our party has apparently become a party of Donald Trump,” she told CNN last year. When asked if she would leave him and become independent, she said that she “sailed in my very interesting political times.
Mis. Murkowski said in Anchorage on Monday on Monday that she had not planned to stop expressing himself, even if she was afraid of reprisals. “This is what you asked me to do,” she said, referring to her voters. “I will use my voice to the best of my abilities.”
She added: “I have to understand how I can do my best to help the many who are so anxious and so afraid.”
Ms. Murkowski, senator of the fourth term, is to be re -elected in 2028.
