Former Trumper eviscerates GOP for unconditionally backing a “thin-skinned, elderly buffoon”

Columnist Nicole Russell held nothing back in a searing op-ed for USA Today condemning the GOP for its unconditional support of Donald Trump.

The former president is currently facing dozens of indictments, and right now, all eyes are on New York, where his criminal trial regarding alleged hush money he paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels begins today.

Related:

The odds of Donald Trump being convicted in his New York trial are actually pretty strong

Republicans should be worried.

The case will determine whether Trump is guilty of providing said hush money to Daniels in an effort to hide disparaging information about him while he ran for president in 2016. Daniels claims she and Trump had an affair, and Trump denies it. Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 a few days before the election, which prosecutors claim Trump then reimbursed through the Trump Organization with payments logged as legal services.

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Russell wrote that “as a former Trump fan who has turned” she understands the temptation to “think that this case isn’t airtight or, on the scale of crimes, that it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.”

“Giving hush money to a porn star? Falsifying the payoffs? I spent a decade around Washington, D.C. A lot goes on that is worse,” Russell wrote.

But she warned that this way of thinking about Trump must change.

“Many might insist that this trial — like the 91 felony charges — and the other three criminal cases against Trump are all rigged,” Russell wrote. “That they’re all some kind of nationwide conspiracy theory among judges to keep Trump from looking squeaky clean as he runs for office. (This theory isn’t even plausible: How could every single judge be in on it? And to what end?).”

She continued, “That’s how bad things have gotten in the GOP. We’ve bargained so hard and lowered the standards so much that accusations of hush money to a porn star and falsified payoffs seem tame in comparison with — with what exactly? Tax fraud? State and federal election interference? Stealing classified documents and showing them to people without such clearance?”

She then poses two questions to Republicans that many in America who do not support Trump have likely been asking: “Where exactly is the bar? What exactly would convince us he’s unfit to represent us and unfit for office?”

Russell condemned Republicans for failing to find someone better to challenge President Joe Biden since the 2020 election. Republicans “can’t have nice things,” she said, “because they wanted Trump even if he came with four criminal cases. They wanted to debate whether or not hush money to a porn star and falsified business payments was the hill to die on, never stopping to ask themselves why they’d lowered the bar that much in the first place.”

In perhaps her most scathing statement, she called Trump a “narcissistic but whiny, arrogant but thin-skinned, elderly buffoon who has conned more than 70 million folks into thinking he’s a better alternative than a Democrat. A massive feat in political charisma and Republican strategy to be sure.”

She explained that Trump isn’t a psychopath and that the crimes he’s accused of committing are exactly what one should expect from “a high-level, manipulative con man” who does not respect the law or women. She said while they are not the worst crimes someone could commit, they are not something a president should be legally accused of.

“This is why looking at Trump’s hush money trial and saying, ‘This it?’ is the wrong thing to say,” she declared. “There shouldn’t be any trials, or criminal cases, or indictments. At all. In fact, that doesn’t seem like much to ask. The real truth is that any of this is unbecoming of a person running for office and it doesn’t best represent conservatives.”