Why former Trump supporters now oppose his re-election

Donald Trump is not the first former president to try to regain office. In this he is preceded by Martin Van Buren, Ulysses Grant, Millard Fillmore, Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland, the only one to succeed, which is why he has the distinction of being considered the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States.

However, if he wins the Republican Party primaries, Trump will become the first former president to be the candidate nominated by a party in more than a century, and only the second by his original party.

This has, on the other hand, the express opposition of an important group of former supporters, and even close collaborators in his government.

This group includes his vice president, members of his Cabinet, senior military, economic and legal advisors, White House officials and members of his first campaign. These are the most notable and their reasons for opposing Trump’s re-election:

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who until mid-November competed with Trump for the Republican Party presidential nomination and was an extremely loyal number two, was placed on the magnate’s list of enemies when he did not follow his plan to stay in the White House despite having lost the 2020 presidential elections.

And that plan included Pence, in his capacity as president of the Senate, not certifying the vote of the electoral colleges on January 6, 2021.

“The American people deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him above my oath to the Constitution, but I kept my oath and always will,” Pence told CNN.

After special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for trying to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, Pence said in a statement: “Anyone who puts themselves above the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”

John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who served as secretary of Homeland Security from the start of the Trump administration until July 2017, when he was appointed chief of staff and interacted with the president on a daily basis.

“I think we are in a danger zone for our country,” Kelly was quoted as saying. Washington Post.

Additionally, in an interview with CNN, Kelly called Trump “a person who has nothing but contempt for democratic institutions, the Constitution and the rule of law. There is nothing more to say. God help us!”.

One of the arguments that Trump and his allies have used to explain their actions after his election loss in November 2020 is that the former president honestly believed he had won those elections.

Bill Barr, who headed the Department of Justice during that period, denied the allegation before the select committee of the House of Representatives that investigated the events of January 6, 2021.

Barr said Trump’s fraud claims were “lies” and that he had warned the then-president that they were doing “great harm to the country.”

According to an NBC News report, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told colleagues on July 20, 2017, after a meeting at the Pentagon with Trump, his top advisers and the joint high command, that the president was a “damn idiot” ( hummockwas the word he used in English).

Tillerson described Trump in an interview with CBS in 2018 as “a fairly undisciplined man, who doesn’t like to read, who doesn’t read briefings, who doesn’t like to go into detail on a lot of things.”

James Mattis, another respected retired Marine Corps general when he joined the Trump administration as its first defense secretary, resigned from the position in December 2018 in protest of the president’s Syria policy.

Mattis remained silent until June 2020, in the middle of the election campaign, when in a statement he accused Trump of dividing the nation.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people; he doesn’t even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” the retired general said.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper wrote in his memoir published in May 2022 that Trump’s behavior had been so erratic after a meeting on China with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that an officer, whom he did not name, investigated the option of use the 25th amendment to remove him from office.

Although Esper makes it clear in the book that he did not believe Trump’s behavior warranted his impeachment, he also told the The New York Times that the former president was “an unprincipled person who, by virtue of his personal interests, should not hold a position of public service.”

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton said in an interview with News Nation that Trump “doesn’t think in terms of policy when he makes decisions, certainly in the area of ​​national security.” “For him it’s all about how things benefit to Donald Trump personally.”

Bolton, who is a hardline conservative, also said that those who give Trump credit on foreign policy “don’t really understand how we got to where we got.”

“In many of these accomplishments, which they now give Trump credit for, he wanted to go in the opposite direction.”

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham accused the former president in a memoir of his time in the Trump administration of abusing his staff, placating dictators like Putin and making sexual comments about a young White House aide.

According to Grisham in her book, Trump constantly berated her and she knew that sooner or later the president would ask her to “tell a lie to the public” which would make her look like “a lunatic.”

In an interview with CNN, former White House counsel Ty Cobb compared Trump to a “mob boss.”

Cobb also said in a Facebook post that in relation to the case of an attempt to overturn the 2020 elections that more than one witness will be able to say that “Trump acknowledged that he lost the election” and added that the former president “is toast.”

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was the first of Trump’s opponents in the 2016 Republican presidential primary to endorse him after he retired, and was a loyal supporter of the former president for years.

Today Christie is one of Trump’s main critics with whom he is once again competing for the Republican presidential nomination.

This time Christie is not expected to endorse Trump. “I just can’t,” Christie told Axios in March. “I don’t think a person who shows videos celebrating January 6 at his rallies is appropriate for the presidency.”

Anthony Scaramucci, the New York financier famous for his brief stint as the White House communications directorate in July 2017, does not hide his opposition to Trump’s re-election, whom he described in an interview with CNN as “the great terrorist.” home of the 21st century.

Scaramucci, who recently said on the program Meet the Press of NBC that Trump is a “con artist” with “sociopathic political behaviors,” he noted that in 2019 he broke up with the then president because it sounded increasingly “more and more absurd.”

Cassidy Hutchinson was the assistant to Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff, during the violent takeover of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. She was an eyewitness to the events behind the scenes that day, told CNN that Trump represents: “The most serious threat to American democracy in our lifetimes and probably in the history of the country.”

It is impossible to summarize the enormous number of accusations and qualifiers that Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen has reserved for the former president, since the breakdown of professional and personal relations between the two men after Cohen’s conviction in the case of illegal payments to buy the silence of pornographic actress Stormy Daniels in relation to an alleged extramarital relationship she had with the former president.

Who is the Hispanic woman in charge of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign?