Senator Susan Collins says she won't vote for Trump in scathing op-ed (original) (raw)

Susan Collins announced she would not vote for Donald Trump on Monday, joining the few other Republican senators to repudiate the party’s nominee for president.

“I will not be voting for Donald Trump for president,” the senator from Maine wrote in an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Monday night. “This is not a decision I make lightly, for I am a lifelong Republican. But Donald Trump does not reflect historical Republican values nor the inclusive approach to governing that is critical to healing the divisions in our country.”

Senators Lindsey Graham, Mark Kirk, Ben Sasse, Dean Heller and Jeff Flake have all said they would either not vote for Trump or adamantly voiced their resistance to the notion. Senator Ted Cruz, who was defeated by Trump in the primary race, urged conservatives to “vote your conscience” at the Republican national convention.

Two Republican representatives, Virginia’s Scott Rigell and New York’s Richard Hanna, have publicly rejected Trump in the past week. On Saturday, Rigell told the New York Times he would vote for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, and earlier last week Hanna said he would vote for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Both Rigell and Hanna have said they intend to retire after this term, and Collins does not face re-election this fall. She has consistently criticized Trump’s racially charged and offensive comments throughout the primary and had refused to say whether she would vote for Trump.

Other Republican senators put in difficult positions by Trump include John McCain, running for re-election in an increasingly Hispanic Arizona, and Kelly Ayotte, running for re-election in moderate New Hampshire. Trump awkwardly endorsed both senators last week after initially refusing to do so.

Trump’s “constant stream of cruel comments” disturbed Collins throughout the primary and through the Republican convention, she wrote, “but it was his attacks directed at people who could not respond on an equal footing – either because they do not share his power or stature or because professional responsibility precluded them from engaging at such a level – that revealed Mr Trump as unworthy of being our president”.

In particular, Collins cited Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter and of Senator McCain’s war service last year, his insistence that a federal judge from Indiana had racial bias because his parents were from Mexico, and finally his criticism of two gold star parents, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son Humayun was a US army captain killed in Iraq protecting other soldiers.

“Rather than honoring their sacrifice and recognizing their pain, Mr Trump disparaged the religion of the family of an American hero,” Collins wrote. “And once again, he proved incapable of apologizing, of saying he was wrong.”

The senator also described Trump as a threat to world security, saying his “lack of self-restraint and his barrage of ill-informed comments would make an already perilous world even more so. It is reckless for a presidential candidate to publicly raise doubts about honoring treaty commitments with our allies.”

Collins also responded to assurances from Trump’s campaign and some Republican leaders that Trump would soften his tone in the general election, and cease criticizing party members and minorities. “There will be no ‘new’ Donald Trump,” she wrote, “just the same candidate who will slash and burn and trample anything and anyone he perceives as being in his way or an easy scapegoat.”

Maine’s Republican governor, Paul LePage, has endorsed Trump, and the candidate himself held a rally in Portland, Maine, last week, despite the state’s long history of voting Democratic in general elections. Collins is more moderate than some of her peers in the Senate, and penned a compromise bill on gun control earlier this year that has failed to gain traction. She was also the first Republican senator who supports same-sex marriage and won re-election in 2014.

She maintained that she will help campaign for other Republicans, but not Trump.

“I revere the history of my party, most particularly the value it has always placed on the worth and dignity of the individual,” she wrote, concluding: “It is because of Mr Trump’s inability and unwillingness to honor that legacy that I am unable to support his candidacy.”