Don Brown, Republican candidate for Senate in North Carolina, told Newsmax on Wednesday that his campaign to replace retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., will "put America first" and that he will be a "MAGA candidate."
Tillis announced at the end of June that he would not seek reelection in 2026 after he came under fire from President Donald Trump for voting against the wide-ranging tax and spending bill that Republicans passed in the first week of July.
Brown said on "Wake Up America" that he "would have supported the bill" that Tillis voted against if he had been in the Senate, saying, "There are too many important things that we have to accomplish."
He said, "We've got to extend those Trump tax cuts and make them permanent. That would have been a disaster if those had expired."
Brown also said action has to be taken at the border, adding, "The border wall protection, the border security has got to take place."
Brown, a former Navy Judge Advocate General, also said that he's "concerned" about the decline of U.S. shipbuilding.
"We're now much smaller than the Chinese Navy," said Brown.
He did note that the legislation "does spend more money than we want to spend, but we're going to come behind that with the rescission package, really go after some of those DOGE cuts, but for national security sake, it had to take place."
Brown added, "I kind of like to joke … our campaign has been so effective since February that we ran our own Senator out of the race — who needed to be out of the race, but President Trump gets credit for that."
He said, "We are going to take the Senate seat. We're going to hold it, and we're going to put an America first, MAGA candidate and senator here in North Carolina our state can be proud of. And it's a good day to know that Senator Tillis won't be running. We're going to take that seat."
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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