Conservative political commentator George Will said to vote against the GOP in the 2018 midterm elections in an opinion article published in the Washington Post on Friday.
Will, who received a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977 and now serves as a regular commentator for NBC and the Post, offered a scathing criticism of President Donald Trump and the GOP at large. He said that the congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced come the midterms in November.
“In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him,” Will wrote.
Will said that the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy of separating children from their parents, which became the subject of an ongoing national furor this week, has provided independents and moderate Republicans with another reason — “fresh if redundant evidence” — to vote against the GOP in November.
He also rebuked several prominent figures in the GOP and the Trump administration, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, senior political adviser Stephen Miller and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
Will took on Ryan with a reference to the Robert Bolt play “A Man For All Seasons,” stating that Ryan has “traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut” and has “wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president.”
Will has a history of outspoken criticism of Trump, and he renounced his membership in the Republican party in June 2016. In December 2017, he called Trump “the nation’s worst president” and argued that his support of Roy Moore should disqualify him from public office.