House Republicans Blast Claim that Donald Trump Dissed Milwaukee: ‘Another Democrat Hoax’

House Republicans are refuting a report that former President Donald Trump, on Thursday, disparaged Milwaukee, the host city for the Republican National Convention in July.

Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman posted on X about a comment Trump reportedly made during a closed-door meeting with House Republicans at the Capitol Hill Club on Thursday.

“Milwaukee, where we are having our convention, is a horrible city,” Sherman quoted Trump as saying. Media were not present for the meeting, so Sherman would have heard this secondhand. However, he did not attribute the comment to any source, even an anonymous one.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) slammed the reporting as false.

“I was in the meeting. President Trump never disparaged Milwaukee,” Banks wrote in a post on X.

He added that it is “[j]ust another Democrat hoax.”

Wisconsin representatives also ripped Sherman’s reporting.

“I was in the room. President Trump did not say this,” Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) wrote in a post on X. “There is no better place than Wisconsin in July.”

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) said Sherman’s tweet is “[a]nother classic example of shitty reporting by a Democratic Party shill pretending to be a journalist.”

Sources also told Daily Caller Chief National Correspondent Henry Rodgers that the 45th president did not make the remark.

Sherman responded to Van Orden’s tweet, contending, “Trump said what he said and people are going to hear whatever they want to hear.”

The 45th president’s senior adviser, Jason Miller, and his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, both called the reporting “bullshit.”

“Wrong. Total bullshit. He never said it like how it’s been falsely characterized as. He was talking about how terrible crime and voter fraud are,” wrote Cheung.

In a repost of a Rodgers post, in which he wrote, “I am told Trump did not say this,” Miller responded, “In other words, BULLSHIT!.”

In an emailed statement, Trump Campaign Deputy Communications Director Dylan Johnson wrote that he “was explicitly referring to the problems in Milwaukee, specifically violent crime and voter fraud.”