Faced with a barrage of questions about former President Donald Trump and national policy issues like abortion, immigration and the 2020 election, Republican nominee for the AG Jay McMahon said his focus and what he hears people care about is crime and economy.
“I’m a Republican, and when I speak to people, the issues that concern them are crime on the streets, fentanyl dropping into our neighborhoods, the opioid epidemic, and just just public safety and the violence related with gangs in their neighborhoods,” McMahon said Sunday when asked if he was a “Trump” Republican.
The Cape Cod attorney and AG candidate appeared on WCVB’s “On the Record,” where the hosts wasted no time challenging the attorney on his platform versus that of his party and its presumptive leader, former President Trump.
McMahon began with the law enforcement issues he listed affecting residents he spoke to across the state before spending the next few minutes trying and failing to steer the conversation away from national politics
“Those are the things they deal with and those are the things I’ve talked about,” he said. “The people I talk to don’t talk about Trump, they talk about the economy. You speak of crimes on the streets.”
McMahon will face former Boston City Councilwoman Andrea Campbell in November in a contest to determine who will fill the role of Attorney General Maura Healey as the state’s top law enforcement officer. Campbell leads him in both notoriety and funding after a long Democratic primary and her previous run as a Boston mayoral candidate.
The Attorney General’s role itself has been cited several times as the reason behind the questions McMahon was asked, with the hosts noting that he may need to enforce some laws he disagrees with as he attempts to tie the connection with Republican politics Party on abortion, immigration and bypassing the 2020 election.
McMahon said President Biden was sworn in as the 46th president, acknowledged the various secretaries of state had certified their findings, and hadn’t spoken to the party about voter fraud, but the second candidate for attorney general wouldn’t say outright that Biden was duly chosen.
“Well, the only doubts I hear[about the election]have nothing to do with the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” he said.
He also said he felt for the nearly 50 migrants sent to Martha’s Vineyard by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and that the Republican governor should have notified officials on the island before sending people there, but he didn’t want to say whether there was a dispatch of the asylum seekers to do the right thing or the wrong thing. He noted that border communities are not warned before migrants arrive.
McMahon said the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was correct in repealing the 1973 law that legalized abortion nationally, although he claimed it changed nothing in Massachusetts. He did not want to say whether he would support or oppose a national 15-week ban.
