These 17 officials would make excellent character witnesses against Trump: GOP strategist

18 January 2024

With Donald Trump appearing to be well on his way to winning the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, many of the Never Trump conservatives who supported now-President Joe Biden in 2020 are supporting him again this year.

Long-time Never Trumpers like MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, attorney George Conway and The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson are much different from Republicans who worked closely with Trump during his presidency but later became publicly critical of him. Scarborough and Wilson railed against Trump throughout his presidency; former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, in contrast, hoped to steer Trump in the right direction but found him impossible to reason with.

In an op-ed published by The New York Times on January 18, Never Trumper Sarah Longwell — founder of the Republican Accountability Project and a GOP strategist — lays out the anti-Trump warnings that have come from 17 people he worked with in the White House.

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"In the history of presidential cabinets," Longwell explains, "former President Donald Trump's stands out for two qualities: turnover and dissension. Mr. Trump churned through cabinet-level appointees so fast that at times, it seemed like he was still on 'The Apprentice' and had to fire one official every week. These appointees didn't start out opposed to Mr. Trump. Not only are they people whom Mr. Trump chose — he claimed he would hire the 'best people' — they are people who thought Mr. Trump was worth working for. But many of them quickly became alarmed by Mr. Trump's personality, temperament and policy aims."

Longwell makes her point with exact quotes from these 17 ex-Trump officials.

Milley, for example, warned, "We don't take an oath to a king or a queen, or to a tyrant or a dictator, and we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator." And former U.S. Navy Secretary said of Trump, "The president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices."

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis described Trump as "the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try," and Mark Esper called Trump a "threat to democracy."

Kelly, Longwell notes, has slammed Trump as "a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators — a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law."

Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr was once considered a Trump loyalist, but became a major critic in response to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

On June 18, 2023, Barr said of Trump, "The fact of the matter is he is a consummate narcissist, and he constantly engages in reckless conduct that puts his political followers at risk and the conservative and Republican agenda at risk.… He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country's interest. There's no question about it.… He's like a 9-year-old, a defiant 9-year-old kid, who's always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table defying his parents to stop him from doing it."

Other conservatives Longwell quotes range from former National Security Adviser John Bolton to former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

In an article for The Bulwark that was also published on January 18, Longwell emphasizes that Trump critics who worked closely with him should play a prominent role in efforts to prevent him from becoming president again.

"If we want to stop a Trump restoration and the promised MAGA dictatorship," Longwell warns, "it's going to require building a coalition of people who understand the stakes. And there are no messengers better equipped to convey the peril of a Trump presidency than those who lived it firsthand, on the inside. But wait, haven't they done that already?"

Longwell continues, "Mark Milley posed for a front-page spread in The Atlantic. John Kelly gave a statement to CNN. Others have back-channeled their grave misgivings, off the record, to Puck and Politico. Hard truth: That's not enough."

The GOP strategist lays out some ways in which Milley and Kelly can give their anti-Trump arguments more prominence and visibility.

"We need John Kelly on primetime TV making the case," Longwell argues. "We need Bill Barr speaking plainly in swing state ads, with millions of dollars behind them. We need Jim Mattis talking straight to camera about what it means to serve the Constitution — and what it means to subvert it. We need John Bolton on Fox News telling Republicans not to vote for Trump. And yes, we need Mike Pence saying to all Americans — loudly, over and over again — what he knows to be true about January 6th: that it was a betrayal of America and a disqualifying offense."

Read Sarah Longwell's full New York Times op-ed at this link (subscription required) and her Bulwark analysis here.

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