By David Horsey Seattle Times cartoonist
It is unprecedented that, of the five living Republicans who were nominated by their party for either president or vice president, only one is supporting the GOP presidential nominee in 2024.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has joined his daughter, former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, in endorsing Democrat Kamala Harris. Former President George W. Bush has not endorsed Harris, but he is definitely not backing former President Donald Trump, and neither is Paul Ryan, the one-time Republican Speaker of the House who ran for vice president in 2012. The guy at the top of the 2012 ticket, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, has made his antipathy to Trump very clear and he seems to be edging in the direction of a Harris endorsement.
Only the 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate, the intellectually fatuous Sarah Palin, is standing up for Trump. It is not hard to imagine that her running mate, the late, great Sen. John McCain, would never join the Trump team. McCain’s son, 1st Lt. Jimmy McCain, suggested as much when he recently joined the ranks of those supporting the Harris/Walz ticket.
And the army of conservative rebels for Harris is growing. It includes an impressive number of people who served in the Trump White House who now insist the man from Mar-a-Lago should never be allowed in the Oval Office again. There are also numerous military leaders and several veterans of Ronald Reagan’s administration who are supporting the Democratic candidate because they think Trump is in thrall to autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Trump has an epithet he applies to everyone on this growing list of Republican detractors: RINOs — Republicans In Name Only. In truth, a more accurate moniker for the likes of Cheney and Romney would be TROUTs — Traditional Republicans Opposing Unhinged Trumpism.
These stalwarts of sane Republicanism have seen their party morph into an extremist personality cult. Far from proving themselves disloyal by opposing four more calamitous years of Trump’s self-aggrandizing misrule, the TROUTs are serving the best interests of their party — and their country.