Republicans turn against Trump

A well-funded group of Republicans, led by the spouse of a member of Donald Trump’s inner circle, has launched a national advertising campaign in an unprecedented effort to unseat a president who is a member of its founders’ own political party.

A particularly biting ad entitled “Mourning in America” harkens back to Ronald Reagan’s famous “Morning in America” campaign and focuses on Trump’s mishandling of the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

George Conway, the husband of Trump’s longtime advisor Kellyanne Conway, is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a cabal of prominent Republicans that believes fervently that its own party’s president has taken the country in the wrong direction. The members of the Lincoln Project feel so strongly that Trump is unfit for office that they have, in their own words, “sparked a nationwide movement with a singular mission: To defeat Donald Trump and Trumpism.”

With a leadership team that includes top political operatives who helped elect both Presidents Bush and were integral to the campaign of the late Senator John Mccain, the Lincoln Project has produced over 70 highly polished videos that have been airing on Youtube, Facebook, and such bastions of conservative media as Fox News. Some of the spots are sidesplittingly humorous while others evoke anger and frustration, but all share a singular goal: to convince mainstream Republicans that it would be better to have a Democrat in the White House than to allow the nation to suffer four more years of Donald Trump.

The mutiny in the ranks of the GOP also includes Rosario Marin, who served as the 41st Treasurer of the United States under President George W. Bush. Marin, a native of Mexico City, is the only foreign-born Treasurer of the United States. Unlike some Trump opponents within the Republican party that have only recently decided that the president’s ineptitude is causing grave damage to the United States, Marin has opposed the bombastic billionaire since he first descended his golden escalator in 2015 spouting anti-immigrant vitriol and setting the tone for his campaign and eventual presidency.

“What do we have here?” Marin observed in a recent interview on ABC News. “The greatest nation in the world on its knees because of failed leadership. We can’t have four more years of this.”

And while Trump may have cowed many in his party into submission by threatening to turn his dedicated ultraright base against them in primary campaigns, Marin is not the only high-profile Republican to speak out against the president.

Utah Senator Mitt Romney, the only member of the GOP to vote to convict Trump during the president’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, said at that time that he knew doing so was a risky decision, but one he felt was moral and correct because be believed “the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust.”

“I take an oath before God as enormously consequential,” Romney said. “I knew from the outset that being tasked with judging the President -- the leader of my own party -- would be the most difficult decision I have ever faced. I was not wrong.”

And while Trump is fond of comparing himself favorably to a president beloved by the GOP, Ronald Reagan, several key members of the Reagan administration have criticized the former reality television star with harsh words both publicly and in private. Just as telling, Trump’s ongoing feud with his party’s two most recent presidents, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and his mockery of his party’s two most recent presidential candidates, John Mccain and Mitt Romney, has won him few friends in the GOP establishment.

Bowing to the very real possibility that four more years of Donald J. Trump in the White House could alienate millions of potential Republican voters for decades, the Lincoln Project and other likeminded conservatives have decided to encourage as many people as possible to cross party lines and elect Joe Biden, hoping that resetting the clock in this way will prove to be for the long term good of both the Republican party and the nation as a whole. (La Semana)