Bernie Moreno is trying to present himself as the pro-Trump option in Ohio’s Senate race. He didn’t quite delete all of his tweets.
The wealthy Cleveland car dealer, who ran for U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2022 and is running again in 2024, has called Jan. 6 defendants “political prisoners,” once said “don’t ever use the word insurrection,” and shared a post from a right-wing Twitter account that condemned the Department of Justice for prosecuting people who were inside the Capitol for “two minutes.”
Unlike many MAGA politicians, however, Moreno’s hardline Jan. 6 rhetoric came not long after he spent the aftermath of the attack tweeting and liking content that was harshly critical of Trump, those who rioted, and 2020 election denialism more broadly.
In a tweet sent on the evening of Jan. 6, Moreno tried to distance Republicans from the violence by castigating and insulting the rioters. “The morons who ransacked the capital don’t represent anyone but the mentally unstable,” he said in one reply.
On Jan. 6, he liked a tweet from the actor Mark Hamill, who wrote, “the only other person enjoying this chaos & anarchy as much as our defeated president is Vladimir Putin.”
