Chicago:
While prominent Democratic figures, including the Obamas, enthusiastically support Kamala Harris as US President at their party’s convention, an unusual group of rebels joins the action: Republicans call on their conservative colleagues to abandon Donald Trump.
The message is not new – several Republicans have spoken out against Trump over the years – but their presence at this week’s carefully orchestrated Democratic convention has reinforced the call for conservatives and independents to reconsider their voting decision in November.
“Let me be clear to my Republican friends at home who are watching,” Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia, where Trump tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, said on the convention stage on Wednesday.
“If you vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, you are not a Democrat, you are a patriot,” he boomed.
Duncan called the recently convicted and twice-impeached former president a “direct threat to democracy” and said his remarks were aimed at the millions of Republicans and independents he knows are “tired of making excuses for Trump.”
“Today our party behaves more like a cult, a cult that worships a criminal thug,” Duncan said.
Several Republicans have been spreading similar messages in Chicago as Harris’ campaign tries to win over as many Republicans and independent voters as possible in a tight election.
Former White House communications director Stephanie Grisham, who had close ties to Trump, took the stage on Tuesday and called her ex-boss a liar with no “empathy, no morals and no loyalty to the truth.”
“I saw him when the cameras were off. Behind closed doors, Trump mocks his supporters, calling them basement dwellers,” she said.
Grisham, who also served as chief of staff to First Lady Melania Trump, mentioned how she went from being a “true believer” to a disillusioned close adviser who wanted out, recalling a turning point during the 2021 riots by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.
“On January 6, I asked Melania if we could at least tweet that while every American has the right to peaceful protest, there is no place for lawlessness or violence,” Grisham said.
“She answered with one word: ‘No.'”
Grisham resigned the same day “because I love my country more than my party,” she said to loud applause, adding that Harris “has my vote.”
– “Kidnapped by extremists” –
John Giles, mayor of Mesa, Arizona, and a self-described “lifelong Republican” who calls the late Senator John McCain his hero, was equally blunt.
He said at the convention that his Republican Party had been “hijacked by extremists and had become a cult: the cult of Donald Trump.”
Giles’ message to centrist Americans like him: “John McCain’s Republican Party is no more, and we owe a damn thing to what was left behind.”
Organizers aired a video on Wednesday in which former Trump voters explained their reasons for switching to Harris.
“I made a grave mistake,” Florida voter Rich Logis said in a video about jumping headfirst into Trump’s MAGA movement. “But it’s never too late to change your mind,” Logis said.
Olivia Troye, a former counterterrorism adviser to Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence, spoke at the convention, while well-known Republican non-Trump supporter and former congressman Adam Kinzinger will take the stage on Thursday, the closing night.
Trump frequently denounces such critics as traitors to the cause, and it remains unclear how persuasive they will be.
David Urban, a Republican adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, dismissed any significant impact.
However, he told CNN that Duncan’s appearance from Georgia “could give the people of this state permission to vote for Kamala Harris.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
