Mike Huckabee, who has been a strong supporter of Donald Trump ever since Trump locked down the Republican presidential nomination, celebrated Trump’s victory this weekend at a gathering in Florida sponsored by far-right activist David Horowitz.
Horowitz’s annual “Restoration Weekend” allows far-right activists to mingle with conservative elected officials. This year, Steve Bannon, who left Breitbart News to run Trump’s presidential campaign and has since been named the president-elect’s chief strategist, was scheduled to attend, although we have not been able to confirm that he actually showed up. Milo Yiannopoulous, a Breitbart editor and apologist for the racist alt-right movement, was given an award.
In remarks to the conference that were broadcast on Periscope by Andrew Torba, the CEO of an alt-right version of Twitter, Huckabee told attendees that Trump “will turn out to be one of the great presidents of our time and may be one of the greatest ever.”
He said that he trusted Trump to “put good people in the Supreme Court” and “put people in the State Department that might rid Foggy Bottom of the horrible pro-terrorist nonsense that has infiltrated that hideous agency.”
He also said that Trump would make sure that government agencies “will run a fair show,” saying that in contrast he would have had to “seek asylum in some foreign country” if Hillary Clinton won the presidency “because I knew I was going to be a target.”
Huckabee also had harsh words for Never Trump Republicans, specifically Ted Cruz, who only endorsed Trump late in the presidential campaign. While he didn’t mention Cruz by name, Huckabee declared that when it comes to anybody who signed a pledge to support the GOP’s ultimate presidential nominee and then took it back, “we should never entertain that person in our party as a serious candidate for public office again.”
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Huckabee also shared his views on why voters handed an unexpected victory to Trump, just as Britain’s Brexit campaign unexpectedly prevailed. He attributed both votes to people being “tired of having everything in their culture basically challenged,” with the exception of “ethnic restaurants” and “recipes” brought in from other cultures, which he was all for:
What happened [in Britain] was, people had had enough of having people go after their culture, their language, their traditions, their religion, their way of life. They didn’t mind them going after the food; those of you that understand there’s no such thing as a British restaurant. ‘Hey, honey, let’s go eat British tonight, okay?’ You go to Great Britain, every restaurant is an ethnic restaurant of somebody other than Great Britain. But they were tired of having everything in their culture basically challenged and taken over by people who did not come to Great Britain to assimilate in it, but to fundamentally change it from the inside out and make it something it had never been before. And if some people couldn’t have seen that happening in the U.S., how dumb were they?
Because across this great country, what we found was that the slogan of Donald Trump, Make America Great Again, was more than a slogan, it was a conviction that yes, we welcome people from any corner of the earth that want to come here and become Americans and join with us in this amazing idea of freedom, liberty, individual responsibility. Celebrate it with us, come, and bring some of the great things that you have from your country and culture, because we like so many things you bring, whether it’s the wonderful recipes you bring, or the unique perspective on life. You can assimilate all of that into this incredible melting pot we call the United States of America, and we’re happy to have you.
He added that immigration is great, but “the one thing we just don’t want is someone to come to this country and burn our flag and raise the flag of another country and wave it in our face and tell us that America isn’t going to be America anymore.”
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Both videos include Torba’s Periscope annotations, and one includes a brief cut to himself.
