Tommy Thompson says he hopes to push Trump, GOP toward unity

Former Gov. Tommy Thompson said Wednesday he hopes to use his support for former President Donald Trump to push Republicans to find unity and work with Democrats.

In a conversation at Cap Times Idea Fest in Madison, Thompson reflected on his five decades in politics but also noted that his experience as a broadly popular governor — the longest serving executive in Wisconsin history — has lessons for modern politics. Thompson has been a staunch backer of Trump, even appearing at a Racine-area rally earlier this year alongside the former president.

“I think right now, the Republican Party deserves a chance,” Thompson said. “I think the Republican Party, right now, has the better ideas for running the country than Democrats.”

But he noted his support for Trump was in part a push to urge his own party to work across the aisle to tackle the serious problems facing Wisconsin and the United States as a whole.

At various points in the evening, Thompson endorsed a range of ideas that might strike the uninitiated as out of character for a Republican.

On stage at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Memorial Union, he proposed converting a state prison into a university to give inmates a path to success after incarceration and hiring retired judges to re-try cases within the correctional system with the hope of reducing sentences and freeing people earlier. He also backed his own decision as governor to launch BadgerCare, the state’s Medicaid program for the uninsured or underinsured.

“There are good ideas from Democrats and good ideas from Republicans,” he said. “In this state and this country … I want you to work as hard as you possibly can for your candidate, Kamala. I’m going to work for my candidate, Donald Trump. But at the end I want to come together because this country has serious, serious problems and we cannot afford to continue to be so partisan and so political that we don’t talk to each other.”

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Editor’s Note: This article is provided courtesy of a content partnership with The Capital Times, an independent news organization based in Madison.