‘He betrayed us’: Republicans are ready to turn on Trump right before the election
With days remaining before the presidential election, influential conservative voices are making stark warnings about Donald Trump’s fitness for office, led by former federal judge J. Michael Luttig’s blistering New York Times op-ed.
“He betrayed us,” wrote Luttig, a George H.W. Bush appointee who previously advised Mike Pence during crucial moments after the 2020 election. “In the almost 250 years since the founding of the nation, no president before Donald Trump has ever so betrayed America.”
The highly respected conservative jurist’s denunciation adds to a growing chorus of former major Republican figures breaking with Trump, including former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and military men like former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley.
Luttig, who endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in August, frames the election as a fundamental choice about preserving democracy itself. “Republicans and conservatives have always proudly claimed they would be the first to put the country above all else when the time came,” he wrote. “That time has come.”
In recent television appearances, Luttig has emphasized that policy differences are secondary to what he sees as the “core issue”—protecting democratic institutions and the rule of law. He argues Trump showed his unfitness through actions around January 6th and subsequent behavior—and that Republicans are on the hook for it. “If Republicans are unwilling to put America before their party now, they will never do so,” Luttig warns. “They must be honest with themselves.”
The judge’s heavyweight critique carries particular significance given his role advising then-Vice President Pence to resist Trump’s pressure to overturn the 2020 election results—which Luttig went deep into for PBS’s Frontline. That experience, he suggests, revealed the depth of Trump’s willingness to subvert constitutional processes.
“The institutions of our democracy and the instruments and instrumentalities of our democracy, it is necessary that we have them, but it’s not sufficient,” Luttig told PBS in 2022. “Without leaders acting in good faith in the interest of the country as opposed to their partisan political interests, the country could not long exist.”
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