200+ Former Bush, McCain and Romney staffers endorse Harris

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More than 200 Republicans who worked for both Bush presidents, the late Sen. John McCain and Sen. Mitt Romney declared their endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign in an open letter released Monday.

The letter comes after several Republicans who are openly critical of former President Donald Trump delivered remarks at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week.

In their letter, which was first reported by USA Today, the former staff members noted that they had come out against Trump during the 2020 election cycle and said they "jointly declare that we’re voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz this November."

"Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected," they wrote. "The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”

The group condemned Trump's policies and Project 2025, a proposed blueprint by the Heritage Foundation for a second Trump term that the former president has sought to distance himself from, saying those proposals "will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions."

They argued that Trump's approach to foreign policy also poses threats to democratic movements abroad and concluded their letter by imploring moderate Republicans and conservative independents to "take a brave stand once more, to vote for leaders that will strive for consensus, not chaos; that will work to unite, not divide; that will make our country and our children proud" by voting for Harris and Walz.

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that the letter is "hilarious because nobody knows who these people are. They would rather see the country burn down than to see President Trump successfully return to the White House to Make America Great Again."

The group joins more than two dozen Republicans — former governors, members of Congress and Trump administration officials who are vocal critics of Trump — who pledged support for Harris' presidential campaign this month.

A similar group of anti-Trump Republicans, including several hundred former aides to George W. Bush and McCain, endorsed Biden’s 2020 presidential election campaign.

Bush, McCain and Romney spoke out against Trump for his inflammatory remarks and were targets of the former president’s attacks. (McCain, of Arizona, died in 2018, a decade after being the GOP presidential nominee; Romney, of Utah, was the party's nominee in 2012.)

Bush, whose brother Jeb Bush ran against Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, did not attend the Republican National Convention last month. He has not publicly criticized Trump, but he did hold a 2021 fundraiser for then-Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., a vocal Trump critic who served as vice chair of the House Jan. 6 committee.

McCain said in 2016 that he couldn’t back Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton, citing Trump’s inflammatory comments about women. His wife, Cindy McCain, later endorsed Biden in the 2020 election.

Romney, who voted twice to convict Trump at his impeachment trials, has repeatedly denounced the former president and said he is putting the country’s future in peril.

. . . "ex-staffer" means it's not that shocking they are now anti-Trump

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday that he will vote for Democrat Kamala Harris over fellow Republican Donald Trump in the November election, warning that the former president “can never be trusted with power again.”

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a statement. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”

“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he concluded.

Cheney’s daughter, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, first revealed earlier in the day that her father would be voting for the Democratic ticket during remarks at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas. The former Republican congresswoman previously announced that she would be voting for Harris, citing “the danger that Donald Trump poses.”

n her remarks Friday, Cheney unleashed a torrent of criticism against the Republican presidential ticket, calling Trump “a depraved human being” and labeling him and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, “misogynistic pigs.”

“Every Republican, anybody who’s contemplating casting a vote for that ticket, you know, really needs to think about what they are enabling, what they’re embracing and the danger of electing people who will only honor election results if they agree with the outcome, and who are willing to set aside the Constitution,” she said in Austin. “And you know in the case of Donald Trump, promote, provoke, exploit violence in order to seize power.”

Trump, in turn, wrote on his Trump Social platform that “Dick Cheney is an irrelevant RINO, along with his daughter,” referring to the Cheneys as “Republican in name only.”

The former congresswoman, who previously told CNN she was committed to doing what was necessary to stop Trump from returning to the White House, said Friday that she expected to campaign against the former president in battleground states this fall. And she suggested that her father shared her views about Trump.

“If you think about the moment that we’re in and you think about how serious this moment is, you know, my dad believes – and he said publicly – that there’s never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is,” she said.

Dick Cheney’s support for Harris represents a stunning move for the staunch conservative who was vice president to George W. Bush and a longtime congressman from Wyoming who held several leadership roles in the House Republican Caucus.

The former vice president was critical of his party and Trump in the wake of the January 6 attack. In campaign ads for his daughter’s 2022 reelection effort, he called Trump a “threat to our republic” and a “coward.”

“He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” Dick Cheney said of the former president in the ad.

She argued Friday that Trump and Vance were “doing everything they can to drive Reagan Republicans away” and that the duo “certainly do not reflect the importance of that Reagan philosophy of peace through strength and a strong national defense.”

Cheney said she watched parts of the Republican National Convention in July and took away that “it isn’t just that the party is trying to whitewash what Donald Trump did … the party is embracing it.”

Speaking about her decision to support Harris, Cheney said while she has “serious policy disagreements on a whole range of issues,” she feels that “those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy, in the defense of our Constitution, and the survival of our republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together to put those things above politics.”

In addition to backing Harris, Cheney also endorsed Democratic Rep. Colin Allred’s effort to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.