WATCH: Nebraska senator explains ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ White House reference made amid Trump endorsement

Published: Mar. 6, 2024 at 6:09 PM EST

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) – U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska was asked Wednesday about several aspects of his endorsement of Donald Trump for president in the upcoming election.

During a news conference with Nebraska media on Wednesday, Ricketts acknowledged that in his endorsement on Tuesday, he had compared the current White House to “Weekend at Bernie’s,” a 1989 comedy film about two young men parading their dead boss around as if he were still alive.

A reporter asked the Republican senator about the comment, saying it did not sound like the Pete Ricketts he covered when Ricketts was governor.

Ricketts explained: “That there is no leadership come from the White House whatsoever. I’ve been here for over a year now, and what I have seen is that what this president does is just he’s hired a bunch of very liberal bureaucrats and just let them do anything they want. There is no unifying message. There isn’t any sort of strategy. It is just these bureaucrats go off and do what they want, which is really what I was hitting upon earlier on too.”

Ricketts said the Biden administration’s electric vehicle push through pollution limitations provides an illustration of that point.

“When you think about the policies that we’re doing — for example, talk about the EV mandate, right? Well, if you push an EV mandate, I’ve had a chance to ask administration fields and other administration officials and others, where are you going to get the power generation? Where are you going to get the transmission lines? Have you thought about where the critical minerals are for the most part, I get answers of. No, we haven’t done that.”

The Biden administration, however, did approve Nebraska’s Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment Plan to the tune of $10.9 million in 2022. The money was intended for the installation of high-powered chargers along approximately 480 miles of designated EV corridors within the state as part of push to get Nebraska switched to electrification by 2032, which Ricketts has said previously is not realistic.

In addition to EV policies, Ricketts said the Biden administration has been “completely incompetent” in handling security at the U.S.-Mexico border. All senators from Nebraska and Iowa voted “no” on a bipartisan border package in February.

“You just look at the disaster at our southern border and you can see an administration that is completely incompetent. You know, again, going back to what we have seen since Joe Biden came into office is now 9 million people have tried to get into our country or have gotten into our country. That’s a population the size bigger than New York City. For the month of December, it was just 300,000 that came across the board. That’s bigger than Lincoln,” he said.

Ricketts said it was more than just a matter of safety.

“We need to have a president who is going to project a strong America, who is going to close down our borders, going to protect American lives. We don’t have that with Joe Biden,” he said.

He also criticized Biden’s use of executive power on the parole system.

“When you look at what is happening, he is abusing his executive power with things like parole. In the years leading up to the Biden administration, so Obama and Trump, they would parole into this country about 5,600 foreigners in a given year. Last year, Biden did it 1.2 million times — 1.2 million people he let in under parole. He’s absolutely abusing that because the law says it’s only supposed to be on a case by case basis in cases of extreme humanitarian need, or for the best interest of the country, and he’s granted to whole classes of people. So he’s abusing his power. ‘

But the Cato Institute says the allowance — used “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” — has been ordered 126 times by every president since it was created, in 1952, except for Trump, according to an Associated Press report from earlier this year.

Still, Ricketts holds that President Biden runs “a lawless administration” and that it’s time for Republicans to get behind Trump because he is, for all practical purposes, the GOP presidential nominee.

“With the results of last night’s primary, the voters have spoken. They have, for all practical purposes, made Donald Trump the nominee, and it is time for now Republicans, to rally around our nominee and to throw Joe Biden out of the White House because of his repeated failures,” he said.

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