COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — As Republican loyalists continue to flee, Donald Trump ignited new party tensions Tuesday by refusing to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan or a pair of senators seeking re-election, a remarkable display of party division just three months before Election Day.
The Republican presidential nominee told The Washington Post he’s “just not quite there yet,” when asked about an endorsement of Ryan, who faces a primary election next week. In doing so, he echoed the House speaker’s comments of almost three months earlier, when the Wisconsin congressman was initially reluctant to embrace Trump as his party’s standard bearer.
Trump’s statement comes amid intense fallout over his criticism of the family of the late Capt. Humayun Khan, a U.S. Army soldier who died in Iraq in 2004. Indeed, just two weeks after a Republican National Convention that tried to focus on party unity, the Trump-driven rifts inside the GOP appear to be intensifying.
On Tuesday, retiring New York Rep. Richard Hanna became the first Republican member of Congress to say he will vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton in November instead of Trump.
“He is unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country,” Hanna wrote in a column published in The Post-Standard newspaper of Syracuse, N.Y.
Also Tuesday, the woman who helped shape New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s national image declared that she’s voting for Clinton.
“As someone who has worked to further the Republican Party’s principles for the last 15 years, I believe that we are at a moment where silence isn’t an option,” former Christie senior aide Maria Comella told CNN.
They join dozens of high-profile GOP leaders who have said they would not vote for Trump, including the party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
A day earlier, Sally Bradshaw, an architect of the Republican National Committee’s 2013 “Growth and Opportunity” report, said she’s leaving the GOP. While not a household name, her decision to leave the party rocked those who make politics their profession.
Bradshaw was one of the five senior Republican strategists tasked with identifying the party’s shortcomings and recommending ways it could win the White House after its losing 2012 presidential campaign.
“Trump has moved in exactly the opposite direction from our recommendations on how to make the party more inclusive,” said Ari Fleischer, who worked with Bradshaw on the GOP’s so-called post-election autopsy and was a senior adviser to President George W. Bush.
Fleischer still supports Trump over Clinton.
In the Post interview, Trump also declined to support the re-election of Arizona Sen. John McCain and New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte. Both had been among Trump’s harshest critics in the wake of his comments about the Khan family.
