Amanda Carpenter, former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post Tuesday describing her disappointment that so many Republican leaders, including her former boss, have backed Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.
“Ever since Trump announced his candidacy 17 months ago, it’s been like watching political body snatchers take over the party, replacing previously respectable men with dead-eyed zombies who readily salute ‘Mr. Trump,'” Carpenter wrote.
“Nearly all succumbed — including, shockingly, my old boss Cruz — who courageously stood before the GOP convention and urged delegates to ‘vote their conscience’ while he declined to support Trump,” she continued. “Apparently, the pressure became too much to bear. Two months later, he reversed course and was phone banking for the Trump-Pence ticket. But, not me. Not ever.”
She wrote that after the election, assuming that Trump does not win, the Republican Party needs to call out Trump’s most vocal supporters.
“Trump will probably be off on his next grand scheme by 2017, but the party will left in the rubble he created. And, if the next GOP autopsy has any credibility, it needs to contain political obituaries for Trump’s most ardent defenders,” Carpenter wrote.
“People such as Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Ben Carson, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and the others. Those who gave Trump credibility and used their influence to rationalize his obscene words and actions need to be named and shamed for what they did,” she continued. “Because the most dismaying thing about the election is not Trump himself. It’s that so many Republicans endorsed his nightmarish campaign.”
In particular, Carpenter criticized Republicans who dismissed Trump’s vulgar comments caught on a hot mic in 2005 about grabbing and kissing women without permission as “locker room talk.”
“If the GOP has truly convinced itself that openly engaging in sexual assault fantasies is something normal that men do among one another, I have a suggestion,” she wrote. “Relocate the Republican National Committee headquarters into a men’s-only locker room. Eliminate all pretenses of wanting to let women in.”
In a video accompanying the op-ed, Carpenter indicated that she feels betrayed by the men in the party that she had worked so hard to defend.
“I do expect, as a woman in the Republican Party that when women are being attacked, that men in the party will rise to defend us. So many conservative, moderate, Republican aides across the board in the Republican Party who are women have defended men for so many years from charges of sexism,” she said. “And then the men in leadership allow the biggest sexist I’ve ever encountered in my life to become the Republican nominee. And so I want them to answer me, we defended you, why didn’t you defend us?”
Watch the video below:
