Kansas’ new governor just publicly snubbed Trump’s invitation to the White House

This evening, President Trump invited the newly elected governors to the White House for a bipartisan introductory meeting with the President and his administration — but not everyone felt it necessary to attend.

Kansas’ Democratic Governor-elect Laura Kelly set the tone for their relationship by telling the White House that she was too busy to travel to Washington D.C. today, instead preferring to spend her time focusing on the transition and crafting a budget to deal with the enormous deficits that eight years of Republican plutocracy had crippled the state with.

“Kansas faces many challenges and the Governor-elect’s first priority is to draft a balanced budget and lay the groundwork to rebuild Kansas,” said Kelly’s office in a statement.

President Trump stumped hard for her opponent, Kris Kobach, and trashed her for her “far left” agenda while accusing her of wanting to spend taxpayer dollars to help take care of undocumented migrants — which anyone who isn’t a heartless monster should approve of.

Perhaps that has something to do with her refusal to visit the White House.

On the other hand, perhaps she simply is very busy and has no desire to travel all the way to Washington so that she can sit and listen to the President ramble on about his very legal and very cool businesses and about the time he went furniture shopping with Anna Wintour before going off to watch television and letting his aides run the meeting.

Predictably, the Chairman of the Kansas GOP, Kelly Arnold, was horrified.  “When you’re invited to the White House, you’re here to represent your state and she didn’t want to represent her state. It would have been nice to have a seat at that table and she chose not to be there” bristled Arnold in a statement.

But as Democratic State Rep. John Carmichael noted, “given the circumstances, a trip to Washington for a photo opportunity with President Trump would seem to be low on the list of priorities” — the “circumstances” being the absolute disaster that the Republicans’ reckless tax-cutting inflicted on the state.

In any case, it’s clear that Trump no longer has a friend in Topeka.

Original reporting by Jonathan Sorman and Bryan Lowry at the Kansas City Star.

 

 

Natalie Dickinson

Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Press. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been freelance blogging and writing for progressive outlets ever since.