My Fellow Republicans, It’s Time to Say Enough With Trump
Oct. 29, 2024
By J. Michael Luttig
Judge Luttig was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.
We Americans live in faith with our Constitution and with the past generations of Americans who swore to protect it and fought to defend it. One week from today, we will decide whether Donald Trump is fit to be president of the United States again. He is not. When we entrusted our Constitution and our democracy with him before, he betrayed us. Campaigning for the presidency again, he now promises to exact vengeance against his fellow Americans whom he deems “the enemy from within,” those who have dared to challenge his betrayal, an enemies list that includes Republicans and Democrats alike.
There could be no higher duty of American citizenship than to decisively repudiate a man who betrayed the nation when he was previously entrusted with the highest office in the land and now threatens the persecution of American citizens who have crossed him. In the almost 250 years since the founding of the nation, no president before Donald Trump has ever so betrayed America.
This is not a difficult decision for voters, though my fellow Republicans and conservatives will finally have to decide what they have long hoped they would never have to decide — whether to put their country above their party. Republicans and conservatives have always proudly claimed they would be the first to put the country above all else when the time came. That time has come. If Republicans are unwilling to put America before their party now, they will never do so. They must be honest with themselves.
All Americans, but especially Republicans, will live with their decision the rest of their lives. This election is anything but politics as usual, no matter how desperately Donald Trump and the G.O.P. have tried to make it that.
As a lawyer and a judge, I have devoted my entire life to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law. I took solemn oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign as well as domestic. While most Americans do not literally take oaths to preserve and defend the Constitution, all Americans freely assume those same oaths and they should take their obligations seriously every single day of their lives without any reservation. The reason America is still the envy of the world after almost two and a half centuries is because so many of its citizens do take seriously their obligations as citizens.
The powers of the presidency are vast and its responsibilities commensurately immense. It is for those reasons that a president has no higher obligations than to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law, the foundational cornerstones of our republic. Through his words and deeds, Donald Trump has over and again demonstrated his palpable contempt for those cornerstones of America’s grand experiment in democratic self-government. He has proved himself to be an anti-democratic, anti-Constitution candidate for the presidency of the United States.
I am 70 years old and I have always voted for the Republican candidates for president because I never doubted they would honor their sacred obligations to our democracy and our Constitution. I have never doubted the Democratic candidates for the presidency would honor their obligations, either. But today, I do not recognize the Republican Party that I have known across my lifetime. It is not the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan and neither is it conservative, as that term has been inspiringly invoked by conservatives since the founding. Today, the party of Lincoln and Reagan stands only for one man and that man’s disfigurement of both republicanism and conservatism.
As I wrote in August when I endorsed Kamala Harris for president, Mr. Trump drove a stake through the heart of America’s democracy and Constitution on Jan. 6, 2021, inciting insurrectionists with his speech on the Ellipse and other actions in an attempt to overturn the presidential election he knew he lost to Joe Biden and prevent the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in almost 250 years.
For his grave offenses that dark January day nearly four years ago, he will forever have the ignominious distinction of being the first American president since the founding to be charged with crimes against the United States. With the assistance of a willing Supreme Court, he succeeded in delaying trial and accountability for his betrayal of the nation until after this election. Now, as he wished, he will never be held accountable for his offenses unless the American people first hold him accountable at the ballot box on Nov. 5.
Yet, to this very day, the former president; his running mate, Senator JD Vance; and much of the Republican Party persist in the fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen from them, and in breathtaking defiance of American democracy and the Constitution, that they can be trusted to ensure a peaceful transfer of power only if Donald Trump wins. That is not democracy and the rule of law. It is autocracy and lawlessness. Respect for the electoral will of the American people and for the peaceful transfer of power are central tenets of our constitutional self-government. Without unhesitating adherence to those fundamental tenets of our Republic by every person who assumes the presidency, America would have neither democracy nor rule by law. Its Constitution would be meaningless words, not magisterial commands. Its greatest strengths would be its terminal weaknesses.
America’s democracy and the rule of law are the only truly consequential stakes in the 2024 presidential election. Yes, there are important policy issues about which we disagree. But that has always been the case and always will be. In this election, these policy differences are comparatively inconsequential, if consequential at all. It is our democracy, Constitution and rule of law that have made America the envy and the beacon of freedom to the world for almost a quarter of a millennium, and on the eve of the 2024 presidential election Donald Trump stands as an imminent danger to those foundational cornerstones of our nation.
Ms. Harris is the only candidate who can be trusted to honor the president’s sacred obligations to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law. The vice president understands and cares about what Donald Trump does not. She calls on Americans to “stand up for the rule of law. For our democratic ideal. And for the Constitution of the United States.” She believes we “have the power to chart a new way forward, one that is worthy of this magnificent country that we are all blessed to call home.”
America has never heard those words from Donald Trump. And it never will.
The choice for America next Tuesday could not be clearer.