When Donald Trump was campaigning to win the White House in 2016, he pledged to hire the best and brightest in the Republican establishment and the private sector to staff his administration. “I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people,” he told the Washington Post in 2016. “We want top of the line professionals.”
Eight years later, on the eve of Trump’s third attempt to win the White House, a number of these former allies and advisers are among his most outspoken critics, warning his victory would divide the public and pose a threat to US democracy.
Among the detractors are former foreign policy and national security advisers, cabinet members, chiefs of staff, attorneys-general, communications staff and a senior member of congress.
Here is what some of them have said:
John Kelly
Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff
A retired marine general, Kelly was Trump’s chief of staff for almost a year and a half from July 2017. He recently spoke on the record about his former boss, telling the New York Times that Trump was a fascist who had admired Hitler in his presence.
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that,” Kelly said. “So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Mick Mulvaney
Former chief of staff
Mulvaney was Trump’s chief of staff for just over a year, before becoming the former president’s special envoy to Northern Ireland. He has publicly expressed doubts over Trump’s ability to win the White House for the Republicans in the 2024 election and resigned the day after the 2021 Capitol Hill riot. Mulvaney said in an appearance on CNBC. “You can’t look at that yesterday and say I want to be a part of that in any way shape or form,” he said at the time.
“I think he’s the Republican who is most likely to lose in a general election, of all our leading candidates, he told NBC news in July.
Nikki Haley
Former US ambassador to the UN
As Trump’s main challenger to win the Republican nomination for presidential candidate, Haley attacked him as “unhinged”, before pivoting to endorse him at the Republican National Convention in July. “Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” she said.
Bill Barr
Former US attorney-general
Bill Barr, an outspoken conservative who joined the Trump administration in 2018, left office shortly after his Department of Justice found no evidence of the widespread election fraud the ex-president claimed in 2020.
Barr has compared Trump to a “defiant, nine-year-old kid” and accused him of putting his “own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests”. Despite this, he told Fox News in April he would vote for the “Republican ticket” in November.
Mike Pence
Former vice-president
Despite being one of Trump’s most longest-serving and most loyal colleagues, Pence refused to block Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election, calling him “delusional”. “It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” he told Fox News in March.
Mark Esper
Former defence secretary
Trump sacked Esper in November 2020, just weeks after publicly opposing his boss’s suggestion that the military should be deployed to quell anti-racism protests that had erupted in a number of cities. In his memoir, Esper also wrote the former president had asked him whether US soldiers could shoot at American protesters.
“I’m not sure we can survive another four years of Donald Trump,” Esper told CNN in March, calling him a “threat to democracy”.
Jim Mattis
Former defence secretary
Mattis, a retired general who was seen as one of “the adults” in the Trump administration, quit in 2018 after the president removed troops from Syria despite his objections. He refrained from publicly criticising Trump for two years, eventually speaking out only to castigate him over his response to anti-racism protests in 2020.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us,” Mattis wrote in a piece prompted by the tear-gassing of protesters in Washington, DC, that summer.
Mark Milley
Former chairMAN of the joint chiefs of staff
Milley served as Trump’s top military adviser for the final 16 months of his presidency, after serving in uniform for 44 years. He has warned the ex-president is “fascist to the core”, according to a book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. In his retirement speech in September 2023, Milley said: “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator or wannabe dictator.”
John Bolton
Former national security adviser
Trump fired Bolton, his hawkish national security adviser who believed in projecting American power overseas, in late 2019. “Trump is unfit to be president,” Bolton wrote in a recent memoir. “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse.”
HR McMaster
Former national security adviser
McMaster, who was Bolton’s predecessor, has said he would not serve in a second Trump administration. “The president wanted advice; he also wanted flattery. He really likes the adulation. In many ways he’s kind of addicted to adulation from his political base, from people around him,” McMaster told CBS News this summer.
Fiona Hill
Former senior director for European and Russian affairs
Hill, the Russia expert who was a star witness in the Congressional impeachment hearings against Trump in 2019, served for two years in his White House.
“He’s trying to bully and intimidate everybody,” Hill said in late 2021. “And you know, he’s bullying and intimidating people in the Republican party who ought to know better. I’m very disappointed that people are not recognising . . . the risk to the United States.”
Gina Haspel
Former CIA director
The former chief of the world’s most powerful spy agency retired from her post the day before Joe Biden assumed the presidency. In comments published in Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Rob Costa’s book, Peril, she said of Trump’s refusal to accept Biden’s victory in the 2020 election: “We are on the way to a right-wing coup. The whole thing is insanity. He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum.”
Anthony Scaramucci
Former Communications Director
Trump fired Scaramucci in 2017 after just 10 days as his communications director. He has spent the years since as one of the former president’s most vocal critics. “What Trump is doing is really bad because his three-legged stool is misogyny, racism and anti-immigration, which, ironically, makes him the most un-American presidential candidate,” Scaramucci told the Financial Times last week.
Stephanie Grisham
Former White House communications director
Grisham worked both as a communications director at the White House and as press secretary for former first lady Melania Trump before resigning on January 6 2021, after a violent mob stormed the US Capitol.
“He was mad that the cameras were not watching him. He has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth,” Grisham said of Trump at the Democratic National Convention this summer, where she endorsed Kamala Harris.
Paul Ryan
Former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives
Ryan spent four years as the top Republican in the US House of Representatives, and was the vice-presidential candidate on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012.
He told Fox News earlier this year that Trump was “unfit for office”, and has previously criticised him for “narcissism” and for doing “whatever . . . makes him feel good in any given moment”.
Elaine Chao
Former transport secretary
Chao, who is married to Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the US Senate, resigned in the final days of the Trump administration over the January 6 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
“There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” Chao wrote in her resignation letter.
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