The Republican operative who wrote “Benghazi mom” Patricia Smith’s RNC speech, where Smith tearfully blamed Hillary Clinton for her son’s death, said he can never vote for Donald Trump in an op-ed published Wednesday.
Richard Cross, a former Capitol Hill staffer, wrote that he believes he’s never voted for a Democrat running for federal office. But now he feels Trump has “betrayed and perverted” the party of Ronald Reagan and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“Weeks after the end of the 2016 GOP convention, I am confronted by an inconvenient fact: Despite what I wrote in that nationally televised speech about Hillary Clinton, I may yet have to vote for her because of the epic deficiencies of my own party’s nominee,” he wrote in a Baltimore Sun column.
“The reality is, I cannot vote for Donald Trump. I could never vote for Donald Trump,” he continued, saying that leaves the “kooky” Libertarian ticket or Clinton as the only feasible options in November.
“The only prospect more terrifying than voting for Hillary Clinton is not voting for her,” he wrote. “The reality of American politics today is, she is the only choice.”
Read the full column over at the Baltimore Sun.
