Cassidy Hutchinson spoke about her decision with Lawrence O’Donnell Wednesday night. Nearly every word she said was thoughtful and meaningful. “I’ve known for quite a long time, number one, that I would never in my life vote for Donald Trump again,” the former Trump staffer said. After watching her testimony to the Jan. 6 Committee and reading her book, that was pretty obvious.
But I do not believe Hutchinson has previously said in public she’d be voting for Harris and Walz, much less other Democrats. Hutchinson said “I don’t ever want to tell somebody how to vote” but she made a darned good case for voting Democratic.
HUTCHINSON: From being up close to Donald Trump, seeing his character, knowing who he is, believing him when he tells us who he is and also who he chose as his vice presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, who’s a whole separate conversation, it's just a despicable portrayal of the Republican party.
I am really, really proud as a conservative to have the opportunity to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in this election.
Policy is important. It's very important to me, and there may be few issues that Kamala Harris and I would see eye-to-eye on. I hope that we’d be able to come to consensus on a lot more issues but in saying that, the character of our leaders really matters, too. We need to be able to elect people that we can trust to uphold out rule of law, people that we want our children to look at and to want to emulate.
Kamala Harris is from a working-class background. Tim Walz is from a working-class background. Those are the people that Donald Trump claimed to represent but actually exploited and manipulated their support.
Hutchinson went on to address Republicans still on the fence. “I understand how frightening it can be to potentially break with your party,” she said, but Trump and Vance “cannot be trusted with the Constitution, they cannot be trusted to uphold our rule of law and they can't be trusted to enact responsible policy.”
That alone is disqualifying, Hutchinson continued, as well as the fact that Trump is still under federal and state indictments.
In addition to looking forward to voting for Harris, Hutchinson said, “it’s also really important to say, for me, at least, that I will also be voting for Democrats in the House and the Senate, too. Just because I think it is so important that we get past this period of Donald Trump for America to begin healing, and once we are past that period, then hopefully we can open up responsible policy debates in the future. But right now, we need to focus on defeating Donald Trump.”
This is why Cassidy Hutchinson is one of my present-day heroes.
