A former Georgia Republican official who had to defend his state’s election administration after Donald Trump tried to overturn the results in 2020 has endorsed President Joe Biden and urged other Republicans to join him in an op-ed published Monday.
Former Georgia Lieutenant Gov. Geoff Duncan, who refused to give credence to Trump’s conspiracy theories about Georgia’s election results and opted not to run for reelection in 2022 due to his rift with the former president, is not an entirely surprising critic. He was drafted by No Labels to run as a third-party presidential candidate this year but ultimately decided against it, worried his candidacy would merely serve as a spoiler. Duncan also wrote a book in 2021 about resuscitating the Republican Party post-Trump.
“Unlike Trump, I’ve belonged to the GOP my entire life. This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass,” Duncan said in a Monday op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Duncan went on to critique certain Republicans by name who have been previously critical of the former president, but have relented in support of the “Republican ticket” in recent weeks, like former Trump administration Attorney General Bill Barr and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). He called that mentality “dead wrong.” An excerpt:
Yes, elections are a binary choice. Yes, serious questions linger about President Biden’s ability to serve until the age of 86. His progressive policies aren’t to conservatives’ liking.
But the GOP will never rebuild until we move on from the Trump era, leaving conservative (but not angry) Republicans like me no choice but to pull the lever for Biden. At the same time, we should work to elect GOP congressional majorities to block his second-term legislative agenda and provide a check and balance.
The alternative is another term of Trump, a man who has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character. The headlines are ablaze with his hush-money trial over allegations of improper record-keeping for payments to conceal an affair with an adult-film star.
Most important, Trump fanned the flames of unfounded conspiracy theories that led to the horrific events of Jan. 6, 2021. He refuses to admit he lost the last election and has hinted he might do so again after the next one.
While Duncan is hardly a surprising Trump critic, the decision to endorse Biden instead is, as he himself points out, a rare move as many elected, supposedly never Trump Republicans struggle to criticize Trump and also make a decision about how to vote in November.
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Unfortunately, Duncan has not quite reached the inevitable conclusion that the current MAGA ized Republican Party need to be defeated up and down the ballot this election before a renewed Conservative Party could be rebuilt. If it is just Donald Trump that loses in November this current anti democratic bullshit will be bolstered by conspiracy theories of stolen elections. The GOP needs to be burned down to the ground.
Is this a big fucking deal?
Well, it’s certainly better than the R’s who have become/remain spineless sycophants.
The Republicans crawling back to Trump are afraid of their base, and afraid of losing power if they cross that base (and a word from Trump makes that a reality). They are a bunch of cowards, who are putting their party in front of their duty to the Constitution and the people…all of us, not just some tiny rabid slice.
Yes, Duncan is a Republican, and he holds political positions that the vast majority of readers here don’t agree with. He’s also obviously a real patriot who believes in the principles of the nation, not one of the fake ones that want power so they can toss those principles aside to force their will onto the nation. Like Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger, he’s basically throwing his career away in an attempt to get the conservatives in the US to step away from the edge…we need all of the Republicans who haven’t drunk the Trump Kool Aid to step up in the same way and take out the MAGA movement. Without this, we’ll remain on the edge of falling into fascism, each election a battle between a relatively normal centrist course and the fall of the US as we know it. Republicans stepping up to do their duty to the nation can’t happen soon enough…sadly, I’m not sure it will ever happen, they seem not to care about anything but winning at this point.
I think that behind the sycophancy we keep seeing is often physical fear of being persecuted if Trump is re-elected. The GOP knows him better and knows that their party would bend over backwards to enable Trump no matter what he does. Which is why I take my hat off tho Duncan.
In the above comments you all make good points, but what I think is missing is that if Republicans that aren’t Trumpublicans don’t vote for Biden and a few more Dems then nothing will get done. The Boeberts, Greenes, and the like also need to go. If there are some Republicans that have bowed down to Trump still in office they need to be countermanded by Republicans who didn’t. If one political party can absolutely lose their f*cking mind then we need to be ever vigilant about our own party too.