Republican Trump Pressured to Change Election Is Voting for Joe Biden
Former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he returns from a break in his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 6, 2024 in New York City. On May 6, 2024, a Georgia Republican announced that he was siding with U.S. President Joe Biden over Trump in the 2024 election.
Former Georgia Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan who was pressured by former President Donald Trump to change the results of the 2020 election announced on Monday that he’ll be instead voting for President Joe Biden in this year’s election.
Biden and Trump earlier this year won enough primary races to secure, respectively, the Democratic and Republican nominations in the 2024 presidential election and will face each other in a 2020 election rematch.
“It’s disappointing to watch an increasing number of Republicans fall in line behind former president Donald Trump,” Duncan wrote in his opinion column published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday. “Yes, elections are a binary choice. Yes, serious questions linger about President Biden’s ability to serve until the age of 86. His progressive policies aren’t to conservatives’ liking.”
He added: “But the GOP will never rebuild until we move on from the Trump era, leaving conservative (but not angry) Republicans like me no choice but to pull the lever for Biden. At the same time, we should work to elect GOP congressional majorities to block his [Trump’s] second-term legislative agenda and provide a check and balance.”
Duncan wrote that “the healing of the Republican Party cannot begin with Trump as president” and that come November he will be “voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.”
Newsweek has reached out to a spokesperson for Trump and a spokesperson for Biden’s campaign via email for comment.
This is not the first time Duncan, now a CNN contributor, has spoken out against Trump. The former lieutenant governor infuriated Trump supporters after the 2020 election by refusing to back attempts to reverse the outcome in Georgia, later accusing the then-president of spreading “10 weeks of misinformation.” In May 2021, Duncan announced he wouldn’t be standing for reelection in the 2022 midterms.
The former president was indicted in August 2023 by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis after an early January 2021 phone call he had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking to “find me 11,780 votes” so he could be declared the winner in Georgia instead of Biden. Trump, meanwhile, has maintained his innocence in the case and said it is politically motivated.
Biden narrowly won Georgia in 2020 and carried the state with 49.5 percent of the vote compared to Trump’s 49.3 percent.
Before his indictment, Trump wrote last year on Truth Social, his social media platform, that Duncan should not testify to the grand jury in Fulton County and added, “He refused having a Special Session to find out what went on, became very unpopular with Republicans (I refused to endorse him!), and fought the TRUTH all the way.”
After testifying before the grand jury, Duncan told reporters that if Republicans want to win in 2024, they need to dump Trump and find a new candidate.
Meanwhile, Duncan spoke to CNN in 2021 about the call between Trump and Raffensperger saying that “it was inappropriate.”
Duncan voted for Trump over Biden in the 2020 election and told CNN that he was “disappointed” by the call and praised Raffensperger’s responses.
“I was proud to hear his voice, I was proud to hear his answers, although they weren’t what the President wanted to hear or anybody else on that side of the call wanted to hear,” he said to the news outlet at the time.
Some of Trump’s former officials and Cabinet members have appeared to move away from the former president, refusing to endorse his second run for the presidency. In an interview with Fox News earlier this year, former Vice President Mike Pence said: “It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.”
“Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years, and that’s why I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump in this campaign,” he said.
Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr and former White House chief of staff John Kelly have also declined to endorse Trump’s 2024 bid.
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