Four years after 50 of the nation’s most senior Republican officials warned that Donald J. Trump would be “the most reckless president in American history,” they are back with a new letter, declaring his presidency less than they proposed and encourage voters to replace former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The new letter, released hours before Mr Biden formally accepts the nomination, places a 10-point accusation on Mr Trump’s actions, accusing him of undermining the rule of law, complying with dictators and doing ” in corrupt behavior that makes him unfit to serve as president. “
They also accused him of ‘spreading misinformation’ and ‘undermining public health experts’, making him ‘incapable of leading during a national crisis.’
“When we wrote in 2016, we were warning against a vote for Donald Trump, but many of the signatories were not ready to embrace his opponent,” noted Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State John Bellinger, a former legal adviser at the State Department and Council of National Security who was among the authors of past and present letters. ‘This is different: Each of the signatories has said he or she will vote for Biden. Signatories are now even more worried about Trump, and have less worries about Biden. ”
For the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Biden has invited a series of Republicans to speak, most notably Colin L. Powell, the former Secretary of State and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Democrats are betting that these adjustments may bring with cross-aisle moderate Republicans who may have supported Mr. Trump perhaps four years ago, but are struggling with the question of whether they can vote for a Democrat.
“While some of us have policy positions that differ from those of Joe Biden and his party, the time to debate these policy differences will come later,” the new letter says. “For now, we need to stop Trump’s attack on our nation’s values and institutions and re-establish the moral foundations of our democracy.”
The letter was released by DefendingDemocracyTogether.org, an advocacy group created in 2018 by anti-Trump Republicans and conservatives. They are spending about $ 20 million to evict him, the group says, including placing the full letter in an ad in The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
Among the signatories are former Reagan administration officials; others who served both George Bush and George W. Bush; and a few, such as John Negroponte, the former director of national intelligence, and General Michael Hayden, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and whose service extended across both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The letter also contains a handful of mid-level officials who served under Mr. Trump. But the list of signatories misses most of the biggest names in national security entering the administration, only to be fired or fired. Among those missing are Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, and three former generals who have served in senior positions: John Kelly, the former chief of staff; HR McMaster, the former national security adviser; and Jim Mattis, the former Secretary of Defense.
John R. Bolton, who was fired as national security adviser last year, has publicly stated that he would not vote for Mr Trump, but refused to embrace Mr Biden, saying he would instead write in a conservative Republican.
When the first letter was released in 2016, it had some shocking value: No one could remember them when established national security leaders left the party’s nominee. Today, critics sound more familiar, though the new letter spans more than three years of international chaos, arguing that Mr. Trump has seriously damaged “America’s role as world leader” by mocking allies, and questioning foreign influence in U.S. elections.
When the most recent letter was drafted, Mr Trump declared ‘his’ love’ and ‘great respect’ for North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un, and praised ‘brilliant leader’ Xi Jinping for his life as president of To serve China, ‘and “Repeatedly sit with Vladimir Putin against our own intelligence community.”
Yet there are arguments the Republican National Security Institute over whether such letters actually harm Trump if they help him.
Peter Feaver, a veteran of the Clinton and Bush administrations who helped draft various versions of the 2016 letter, decided not to sign the release on Thursday.
“I’m not sorry I signed the 2016 letters, and I think the new letter is precise in its critique of Trump’s performance,” Mr. Feaver, a professor at Duke University, said in an interview. .
But he said he was afraid that “letters like this have some unintended consequences. “Trump could earn the 2016 letter and buy himself a street money against anti-establishment,” said prof. Feaver. “His team even thought the letters were a net plus for him.”
In fact, Mr. Trump claimed four years ago that the signatories had gotten the United States into Iraq and Afghanistan, as “globalists” who put the interests of other peoples before the United States. He continued the theme this week, retweeting a message that Mr. Powell called “a Neocon WMD hoaxer” who had endorsed the “Marionette puppet of the founding”, Mr. Biden.
The 2016 letter had another effect: It disqualified a fleet of Republicans from serving in the Trump White House, including many who would have provided a much deeper bank of experienced officials. Republicans split in 2017 between those who refused to serve under Mr Trump and others, such as Mr Tillerson and Fiona Hill, the Russian expert who joined the National Security Council and later testified at hearings on impeachment over Mr Actions’ actions. . Trump in Ukraine, who believed they had an obligation to try to lead his foreign policy.
But in private, they were often accused of silently undermining his policies or acting as secret sympathizers with the “Never Trump” movement. Mr. Tillerson was finished, officials said, as soon as he was widely reported to have described Mr. Trump as “a moron” after a briefing – an account that Mr. Tillerson never refused.
Professor Feaver said that if Mr. Trump wins in November, “the pool of potential officials in 2021. will be even thinner.”
