Former GOP official in Georgia says Trump has a ‘moral compass like an axe murderer’
Geoff Duncan, state’s lieutenant governor during 2020 election, says series of criminal indictments should persuade Republicans not to pick former president as 2024 nominee
A former Republican politician in Georgia on Monday said former US president Donald Trump has a “moral compass like an axe murderer” and urged his party to avoid choosing him as its nominee for the 2024 presidential election.
Geoff Duncan, who served as lieutenant governor of Georgia at the time of Trump’s election defeat in 2020, told CNN the “dashboard is going off with lights and bells and whistles” as the former president faces 91 criminal indictments across four separate criminal cases.
“Fake Republican, a trillion dollars’ worth of debt [accumulated during his administration], everything we need to see to not choose him as our nominee, including the fact that he’s got the moral compass of a… more like an axe murderer than a president,” said Duncan, a contributor to the network, according to The Guardian.
“We need to do something right here, right now. This is either our pivot point or our last gasp as Republicans,” he added.
In Duncan’s home state alone, Trump was indicted two weeks ago for 13 racketeering and other charges, accused of scheming to illegally overturn his loss to US President Joe Biden.
Duncan described Trump’s rap sheet as “a two-plus-year crime spree from coast to coast.”
“I think it’s so interesting to continue to watch this play out like some sort of Ponzi scheme of lies that just kind of built. And if you look at their defenses at this point, it’s all technicalities,” he said.
The Georgia indictment details dozens of acts by Trump and his allies to undo his defeat in the battleground state, including hectoring the Republican secretary of state to find enough votes to keep him in power, pestering officials with bogus claims of voter fraud, and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electoral college electors favorable to Trump.
Trump is also set to go on trial in New York, south Florida, and Washington in other major cases against him.
The indictment came just two weeks after the Justice Department special counsel charged him in a vast conspiracy to overturn the election, underscoring how prosecutors after lengthy investigations that followed the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol have now, two and a half years later, taken steps to hold Trump to account for an assault on the underpinnings of American democracy.
The latest charges herald the unprecedented scenario of the 2024 presidential election being litigated as much from the courtroom as the ballot box.
“When you have four trials to have to compete with on a calendar, you’re not gonna be able to, you know, skip certain days because it’s your birthday, or skip certain days because you’ve got a nail appointment, right?” Duncan told CNN.
“You’re gonna have to actually go face the music,” he said.
As indictments mount, Trump — the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024 — often invokes his distinction as the only former president to face criminal charges.
He is campaigning and fundraising around these themes, portraying himself as the victim of Democratic prosecutors out to get him.
Trump was charged in Georgia with making false statements and writings for a series of claims he made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other state election officials on Jan. 2, 2021, including that up to 300,000 ballots “were dropped mysteriously into the rolls” in the 2020 election, that more than 4,500 people voted who weren’t on registration lists and that a Fulton County election worker, Ruby Freeman, was a “professional vote scammer.”
