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- Two former GOP congressmen, Charles Djou of Hawaii and Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, announced their support for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in a Roll Call opinion article.
- Djou and Edwards are part of “Republicans and Independents for Biden,” a group of nearly 100 former GOP lawmakers who are supporting the former vice president.
- The pair blasted President Donald Trump as “an ill-formed man who lacks basic self-control and shows no semblance of inner character.”
- Both Djou and Edwards said they would like to see a return to civility in politics, and they see a Biden presidency as the best way to achieve their goal.
- “Joe Biden is not a perfect man, but he is a man of humble decency,” they wrote.
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Two former Republican congressmen sharply condemned President Donald Trump’s behavior in a opinion piece published Friday, calling for a return to bipartisanship and declaring their support for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Charles Djou, a military veteran who represented Hawaii’s 1st Congressional district from 2010 to 2011, and Mickey Edwards, a founding trustee of the conservative Heritage Foundation who held Oklahoma’s 5th district seat from 1977 to 1993, co-wrote the Roll Call article that highlighted how they felt the incumbent president failed to embody Republican principles.
“Donald Trump may pretend to be heir to the great Republican tradition that appealed to us both but he is no Republican,” they wrote. “He is simply an ill-formed man who lacks basic self-control and shows no semblance of inner character… We are so disturbed by Trump’s name-calling and childish taunting, his penchant for conspiracy theories and his embrace of conspiracy websites, all of which reflect a disturbing paranoia.”
While Djou, 50, and Edwards, 83, are from vastly different states and generations, they were unified by what they perceived as Trump’s lack of respect for the country’s diversity.
“America is a nation of immigrants, and it benefits from a national fabric woven with the threads of many people, of many backgrounds and cultures, all united in the common belief and love of American liberty,” they wrote. “He recklessly declares that immigrants are ‘animals’ and ‘rapists.’ His anti-immigrant approach bears a much closer relationship to the autocrats in Turkey or Russia or China than the American Statue of Liberty.”
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the group, an affiliate of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, will spend at least $10 million on pro-Biden ads and mailers targeted towards suburban voters in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
The former congressmen concluded their article with a message of support for the former vice president.
"Joe Biden is not a perfect man, but he is a man of humble decency," they stated. "America needs a restored sense of national unity, basic civility and true character in our president."