Retired Texas judge leaves GOP over Trump's 'rotten core'
The former Republican called Trump ‘the worst president in the history of this country.’
A retired Texas judge is leaving the Republican Party after issuing a blistering statement condemning Trump’s racism and Republican complicity, the Austin American-Statesman reported Tuesday.
“It has taken me years to say this publicly but here I go. President Trump is the worst president in the history of this country,” Elsa Alcala, a former judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, wrote on her Facebook page.
“Even accepting that Trump has had some successes — and I believe these are few — at his core, his ideology is racism. To me, nothing positive about him could absolve him of his rotten core.”
Alcala was particularly incensed at Trump’s recent attacks on four Democratic women. On Sunday, Trump told Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” The four women of color are American citizens, and Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Tlaib were all born in the United States. Trump has been widely condemned for invoking a racist trope against the members of Congress.
“And don’t tell me to go back where I came from,” Alcala wrote on Facebook. “My relatives have been in this Texas area since it was before the USA and I was born in the USA.”
Alcala was appointed to her position in 2011 by then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who now serves in Trump’s Cabinet leading the Department of Energy. Alcala retired in 2018.
The retired judge also lambasted Republicans in Texas and around the country for their embrace of Trump.
“The current Republican Party supports Trump, so I cannot support that party in Texas or nationally,” she wrote.
“Every day with the Republican Party seemed worse than the day before. Trump speaks about brown people like me as lesser beings,” Alcala told the American-Statesman.
She also said she will vote in the Democratic primary and that “any of the viable Democratic presidential candidates are superior to the status quo.”
Alcala joins other judges and Republican politicians who have left the party because of Trump’s hateful ideology and rhetoric. In December, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court ditched the GOP after Trump and the party wholeheartedly embraced Supreme Court nominee and alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh.
In Kansas, a handful of Republican state legislators denounced and left the party in December, with some citing Trump’s vulgarity toward women as the reason.
The Republican Party’s embrace of Trump’s racism and sexism may play well to Trump’s base, but it’s not without its consequences.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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