Former Trump supporter breaks ranks: GOP colleagues trapped defending the indefensible

A former Republican congressman and ex-supporter of President Donald Trump says that his former GOP colleagues are “going to go down” with their commander-in-chief, despite his flaws.

“I'll tell you what, Jim — you and I have talked about this before,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) told reporter Jim Acosta on Acosta’s Substack. “There are so many things that just make me angry and sad about what Trump's done to this country, but I think it is this more than anything: his attack on our elections process. We have the safest, most secure elections in the world. And damn near all of my former Republican colleagues say that and believe that — but they cannot say it publicly.”

He added, “Think about what Trump is saying: that someone who goes to vote in person on Election Day at 12 noon, that vote counts — but somebody who gets their ballot in and submits their mail-in ballot by 12 noon on Election Day, that ballot doesn't count. This is his continued effort to attack our elections. And if you attack our elections, you're our enemy. We know what he's trying to do for the midterms. We know what he's trying to do.”

Acosta then asked Walsh if Republicans will ever stand up to Trump.

“There are bits and pieces on the outside, but generally they're all sticking with him,” Walsh told Acosta. “They had an effort to vote against his war, and even in a non-binding resolution, [Louisiana Sen. Bill] Cassidy and [Kentucky Sen.] Rand Paul took their vote back. They generally stand with him on everything Their opposition to the SAVE Act is not really the SAVE Act. It's the institutionalists in the Senate who don't want to get rid of the filibuster.”

He concluded, “Generally, they're all with him and they're going to go down with him in November.”

Trump is reportedly “livid” that a Supreme Court judge he appointed, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not support his effort to stop mail-in votes from arriving after Election Day.

“He is completely livid over the mail-in ballot ruling,” CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes explained on Monday. “And of course, part of this is about the justices who decided to rule against him in this case. Just a reminder — this was the Republican National Committee challenging a Mississippi law that allowed mail-in ballots that came in after Election Day to still be counted.”

Meanwhile on MS NOW Hogan Gidley, a former White House deputy press secretary for Trump, was met with laughter when he tried to deflect from Trump’s saying that he views affordable housing legislation with a “yawn” until he gets his voter regulation law passed.

“I do think, though, he is focused on making sure that our elections have some semblance of faith, trust and confidence, which they have been losing in this country for decades,” Gidley said. “You'll remember around 65 percent of Republicans did not believe that Joe Biden won the election.”

The studio laughed when Gidley claimed Trump is not obsessed with stopping voters who he believes will oppose him.

Dan Vicuña, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the nonprofit good government group Common Cause, told AlterNet earlier this month that Trump’s attempts to regulate voting are arguably illegal.

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”