When former six-term S.C. Republican Congressman Bob Inglis endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in an exclusive Sept. 16 interview with the Charleston City Paper, he had no idea it would turn into a major national news story, with coverage on CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post website and more.
But he thinks he knows why it did.
“The reason it’s gotten attention is because actual conservatives, actual Republicans who really have experienced Trumpism are coming forward to say this is not true north, this is the wrong direction,” Inglis told the City Paper’s sister publication Statehouse Report in a followup interview Thursday. “That’s a powerful moment.”
Inglis, who represented Greenville’s 4th congressional district from 1993-99 and again from 2005-11, is the first major Palmetto State GOP leader to publicly endorse Harris. And he says the response from his fellow Republicans so far has been mixed but “mostly positive.”
“The negative is what you’d expect: I’m a RINO,” Inglis said, using the acronym for Republican In Name Only. “But some unexpected folks have said ‘thank you, Bob.’ So that’s the positive: ‘Oh, finally, a real Republican.’”
The endorsement that went viral
“Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the republic,” Inglis told the City Paper on Sept. 16. “He’s disqualified based on character and rationality, so I’ll be voting for Kamala Harris.”
Continuing, the former GOP congressman pulled no punches with regard to the former president’s character, calling him a narcissist who’s “completely consumed with himself.”
“I feel sorry for him,” Inglis said. “He’s really quite a sick puppy. He needs some help.”
And Inglis had a warning for Republicans who understand Trump’s flaws but see him as preferable to a Democrat.
“He’s been unfaithful to three wives,” Inglis said. “Why would we, at the altar with him as the fourth, think that he’s going to be faithful to us? Talk about irrationality.”
Inglis sees Trump as a symptom of a larger problem bedeviling the GOP — what he describes as a Fox News-fed refusal to see the world as it is. In fact, it was that concern that eventually led him to become the executive director of RepublicEN.org, a conservative nonprofit that acknowledges the evidence of climate change and promotes market-based solutions to address it.
Restoring rationality
“My party needs to restore its rationality to be the credible free enterprise, small government party again,” he said.
And that, Inglis makes clear, is his ultimate goal in endorsing Harris. He wants to see the party return to what he sees as its rational Reaganite roots on core conservative issues like immigration, free trade and limited government.
“If Donald Trump loses, that would be a good thing for the Republican Party,” Inglis said. “Because then we could have a Republican rethink and get a correction.”
Inglis isn’t alone in hoping for a Republican rethink after the election. And more importantly, he isn’t the only prominent member of the GOP who’s prepared to endorse Harris to get one.
The Republicans for Harris movement that started last month has snagged an unprecedented number of high-profile GOP endorsements, political observers tell the City Paper. And the group only seems to be gaining momentum, with hundreds of new endorsers in the past two weeks alone, including former GOP Vice President Dick Cheney, former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and famed conservative columnist George Will— in addition to 17 Reagan administration officials and more than 200 presidential campaign staffers of George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
For its part, the Trump campaign has dismissed the effort as irrelevant.
“President Trump is building the largest, most diverse political movement in history because his winning message of putting America first again resonates with Americans of all backgrounds,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told NPR. “Kamala Harris is weak, failed, and dangerously liberal and a vote for her is a vote for higher taxes, inflation, open borders, and war.”
A growing split
But political scientists say the Harris endorsements reflect a real and growing split between the conservative Reaganites who built the modern Republican Party and the Trump faction that’s now in charge.
“The people making these endorsements represent the party before Donald Trump took it over,” College of Charleston political scientist Karyn Amira said. “And at their core, they just don’t agree with Trump’s more authoritarian, populist style of conservatism.”
Specifically, Amira says, these GOP leaders object to what they see as Trump’s betrayal of traditional conservative beliefs on one issue after another, from tariffs to abortion to the size and scope of government – a situation that Trump’s selection of U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate only exacerbated.
“When he picked Vance, he was picking a protege, someone who personifies the complete 180 he’s caused in the party,” Amira said. “Choosing Vance was a signal to everyone, including older Republicans, that ‘when I’m gone, this is what my legacy will be,’ and that didn’t help in easing anyone’s mind about the future.”
Scott Huffmon, a political science professor and director of the Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at Winthrop University, traces the roots of the split back to the latter days of the Trump administration.
“The first few pebbles of this avalanche really started close to the end of his presidency,” Huffmon said in an interview. “That’s when we saw more people from the Republican party start to speak out negatively against him.”
Nevertheless, Huffmon says he doesn’t expect the impact of the recent endorsements to reach beyond what’s left of the more traditional Republican base.
“If you are not a MAGA supporter, you are seen as and called a RINO,” he said. “For Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, who are so far to the right, to be called RINOs by folks today says a lot about the evolution of the party, and how it has come to be centered around the orbit of Donald Trump.”
At home on his small farm Upstate, Inglis doesn’t disagree. But he knows he doesn’t need every Republican, or even most Republicans, to reject Trump. He just needs a relative handful in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Or as Inglis put it to the City Paper, “Hopefully enough to save the republic from a dangerous second Trump term.”
- Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!