Members of Donald Trump's inner circle have discussed the former president giving the official Republican response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union, NBC News reported.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., early this year invited Biden to deliver his annual address on March 7.
Although aides and allies have discussed Trump presenting the GOP response, two sources told NBC News that the former president is leaning against it.
At least one Trump supporter in Congress likes the idea of Trump giving the response.
"Of course President Trump should do it," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., told NBC News.
Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., will decide who gives the Republican response to Biden's speech.
Johnson has been a supporter of the former president, but McConnell is no fan of the current front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.
Trump's team has not reached out to people planning the GOP rebuttal, a source familiar with the planning of the State of the Union address, told NBC News.
"There are no plans at this time" for Trump to deliver the Republican response, a senior Trump aide told the outlet.
Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller was more to the point.
"This is complete [expletive], and proves the fake news will literally run anything based on their own imaginations," Miller told NBC News.
A GOP lawmaker told the outlet that Trump giving the response "just didn't make any sense to me, and that's what I told him." The lawmaker added, "I genuinely got the sense there was not a lot of interest there to begin with."
Some Trump allies understand that the opposing party's response to the State of the Union can be tricky.
"When was the last time a rebuttal went well?" a former Trump White House official told NBC News. "There's a long history of these things being flops."
With Democrats hoping to make abortion rights an issue in the 2024 general election, Biden invited the mother at the center of a high-profile Texas Supreme Court abortion case to attend the State of the Union, CNBC reported.
Kate Cox, 31, was denied an emergency abortion by the Texas Supreme Court in December. She left the state to get an abortion after a lower court ruling that would have allowed her to get an abortion for a pregnancy with a severe anomaly was overturned, ABC News reported.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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