Late last week, the two major-party presidential nominees traded notable endorsements. On the one hand, Donald Trump picked up support from independent conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which didn’t seem to bother Democrats at all.
Around the same time, Kamala Harris and her team said they would see the RFK Jr. endorsement and raise Team Trump with a dozen Republican White House lawyers who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations, each of whom are now supporting the Democratic nominee.
This week, something similar happened. Trump picked up backing from former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, at which point members of Team Harris again said they’d see the former congresswoman’s endorsement and raise Trump a whole lot more of bipartisan support. USA Today reported:
More than 200 Republicans who previously worked for either former President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., or Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president in an open letter Monday obtained exclusively by USA TODAY. The letter from alums of the three Republican presidential nominees prior to former President Donald Trump comes on the heels of a Democratic National Convention last week in Chicago that showcased Republican detractors of the GOP nominee. At least five former aides to former President George H.W. Bush also signed the letter, which has 238 signatures in all.
If this sounds at all familiar, President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign received similar backing from former Bush, McCain, and Romney staffers four years ago. The difference is, the number is even larger now.
“We reunite today, joined by new George H.W. Bush alumni, to reinforce our 2020 statements and, for the first time, jointly declare that we’re voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz this November,” the letter reads. “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”
These new endorsements, eagerly touted by the Democratic nominee’s campaign, came on the heels of Harris also picking up a variety of other Republican endorsements and Democrats including some GOP speakers at the party’s convention in Chicago. To be sure, there’s room for debate about the electoral impact of announcements like these, but don’t be too quick to overlook the broader context. Trump continues to insist, on a daily basis, that the vice president is a radical communist hellbent on destroying the American way of life. It’s against that backdrop that hundreds of Republicans, who’ve held public office and/or served in GOP administrations, keep coming forward to effectively remind the electorate just how wrong the former president’s attacks are.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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