Top GOP Republicans say ‘Donald Trump is unfit to lead’

While most of the GOP has abandoned conservative ideology and American patriotism to pursue the authoritarian MAGA white nationalism represented by disgraced former president Donald Trump, dozens of leading Republicans are rejecting the rapist and convicted criminal.

Vice President Harris’s campaign launched “Republicans for Harris” with more than 25 GOP endorsements, including former secretaries Chuck Hagel and Ray LaHood, as well as former GOP governors and lawmakers representing principled conservatives and Republicans across the country who are determined to vote for the Democratic nominee for president.

Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman was one of the 24 Republicans to endorse the Vice President’s campaign.

“I was a proud Republican, but Donald Trump is unfit to lead our nation. We saw during his four years in office how he consistently chose himself, his pursuit of power, and his billionaire friends over the American people while spewing lies and spreading chaos at every turn,” said Whitman. “It’s time to move forward by electing Vice President Kamala Harris.”

The campaign announced Sunday that Trump-era White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham and Olivia Troye, ex-national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, also endorsed Harris.

Republicans for Harris will focus on activating GOP voices “to speak to their friends and family about the importance of voting for the Vice President,” according to the campaign, which described the group as a “campaign within a campaign.”

Other endorsements came from former GOP Govs. Bill Weld of Massachusetts and Jim Edgar of Illinois, along with former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan.

Former Reps. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, Joe Walsh of Illinois and Susan Molinari of New York put their support behind Harris in November, along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.

The group will have kickoff events Monday in battleground states Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Harris is closing in on the announcement of a running mate and a tour of battleground states with her yet-to-be-named pick that is scheduled to start Tuesday in Philadelphia.

Her team is trying to create “a permission structure” for GOP voters who would otherwise have a difficult time voting for Harris.

The GOP effort will rely heavily on Republican-to-Republican voter contact, based on the belief that the best way to get a Republican to vote for Harris is to hear directly from another Republican making the same choice.

Trump is the only former president who has been convicted of a crime and hecwas adjudicated to be a rapist, fraudster and defamatory liar in American courts by jurors who were selected at random and screened by his lawyers.

Of the 42 people who worked in Trump’s Cabinet, only half support his bid for another term.

His former vice president, Mike Pence, has been publicly critical of Trump and said that he does not support his candidacy.

Harris interviewed at least three potential running mates Sunday. The Democratic ticket plans to campaign in coming days in each of the seven most competitive states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Unite Here, a hospitality workers union representing 300,000 people, is endorsing Vice President Harris and her unknown running mate.

Harris, who has maintained an aggressive travel schedule since becoming the likely Democratic nominee two weeks ago, spent the weekend in Washington with lawyers and her closest aides.

Not all Republicans who see Trump as anathema or the kind of existential threat to democracy feel compelled to cross party lines.

Former attorney general William Barr said, “I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump.”

Barr resigned in December 2020 after repeatedly telling Trump there was no widespread fraud in the election he had just lost. Barr said Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” last year, but ultimately said in April he would vote for him.

Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley said Trump was “unhinged,” in February, before endorsing him at the Republican National Convention in July.

Trump has reversed course on such bedrock Republican Party positions as fiscal responsibility by adding $8 trillion to the national debt and abandoning America’s leadership role in world affairs by embracing authoritarian governments in Russia, North Korea and communist China.

However, his overt racism, incitment of violence, and appeals to puritanical religious zealots have created a cult-like following that has become a danger to continued democratic government.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton excoriated Trump as an utterly self-interested man who would punish personal enemies and appease adversaries Russia and China in a memoir about his time in the White House in 2018 and 2019, accused the Republican presidential frontrunner of having no political philosophy or coherent policy outlook.

If re-elected, Trump could leave the NATO security alliance, curb support to Ukraine despite Russia’s 2022 invasion, embolden China to blockade Taiwan and generally pursue isolationism, Bolton warned..

“Trump is unfit to be president,” Bolton wrote in “The Room Where it Happened,” his account of the 17 months he spent as Trump’s national security adviser. “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse.”

While Trump casts himself as the underdog’s champion, once saying “for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” Bolton argues he is fundamentally self-serving.

“Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term,” he wrote in the forward to the paperback edition of his memoir, which painted a bleak picture of America during a second Trump term.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson questioned Trump’s fitness, calling him a “moron,” after a July 20, 2017, meeting at the Pentagon with members of Trump’s national security team and Cabinet officials.

Tillerson painted a scathing picture of his old boss as someone who made uninformed decisions that were not based in reality.

“His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this,” Tillerson said in a lengthy 2021 interview with Foreign Policy.

“I used to go into meetings with a list of four to five things I needed to talk to him about, and I quickly learned that if I got to three, it was a home run, and I realized getting two that were meaningful was probably the best objective,” Tillerson said.

He added that he “started taking charts and pictures with (him) because I found that those seemed to hold his attention better.”

“I think the other challenge that I came to realize early on is there were so many people who had access to his ear who were telling him things, most of which were untrue, and then he began to listen to those voices and form a view that had no basis in fact,” the former secretary of state said.

“So then you spent an inordinate amount of time working through why that’s not true, working through why that’s not factual, working through why that’s not the basis on which you want to understand this, you need to set that aside, let’s talk about what’s real. I think that was as big a challenge as anything,” Tillerson said.