It’s not unusual for a coterie of Republicans to criticize President Trump behind closed doors.
Republicans generally keep whatever misgiving they have about Trump to themselves. Public criticism by fellow Republicans over his three years in office has been rare.
But in 2019, a year that included Trump’s impeachment on Dec. 18, some criticism of the president was public, even if much of it was fleeting and temporal rather than extended and sustained.
Here are seven Trump detractors from the last 12 months:
Michigan Rep. Justin Amash
Amash, 39, was a Republican for the first half of 2019, as he had been since winning his Western Michigan House seat in 2010. But he left the GOP over Trump in July to become an independent, setting himself up for a competitive reelection battle in the Grand Rapids area. Amash has been open about the possibility of accepting the Libertarian Party’s 2020 presidential nomination to challenge Trump next year.
Amash was the only non-Democratic House member to support the two articles of impeachment, over Trump’s efforts to strong-arm Ukraine leaders to dig up political dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading 2020 Democrat.
Former Michigan Rep. Dave Trott
Trott, 59, has been retired from Congress since January, but he panned Trump this month in an open letter to the Atlantic, going so far as to say he was considering voting for a Democrat in the 2020 general election. Trott’s northern and western Detroit district, which he’d held from 2015 to 2019, flipped in 2018, with Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens replacing him in the 116th United States Congress.
“President Trump’s inability or unwillingness to follow normal decision-making protocols has created chaos in our foreign policy and put our country at risk,” Trott wrote. “Trump is psychologically, morally, intellectually, and emotionally unfit for office. We can only hope Congress impeaches and removes him so we have a choice between two adults in 2020.”
Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford
Lankford, 51, who was first elected to an Oklahoma-based House seat in 2010 before winning his statewide race in 2014, admitted this week he and his wife weren’t raising their two children in Trump’s image. The senator, who’s also disapproved of the Trump administration’s foreign and immigration policies, told CBS he didn’t “like the way that he tweets, some of the things that he says. His word choices, at times, are not my word choices. He comes across with more New York City swagger than I do from the Midwest. That’s definitely not the way that I’m raising my kids.”
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney
After Romney, 72, clinched his Utah Senate seat in 2018, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee foreshadowed his approach to Trump, accusing him in an opinion piece of not rising “to the mantle of the office.” He followed up his condemnation in October by describing the president’s appeals to Ukraine and China to investigate Biden as “wrong and appalling.”
Former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake
Flake, 56, didn’t seek reelection in 2018 after polling indicated it’d be an uphill climb for the so-called Never Trumper. But the single-term senator, who also represented Phoenix and surrounding suburbs in the House for 12 years, hasn’t stopped knocking the president. In an opinion piece this month, he warned Republican senators against following House GOP’s lead in “attempting to shift blame with the promotion of bizarre and debunked conspiracy theories” regarding impeachment. “It will have long-term ramifications for the country and the party, to say nothing of individual reputations,” he wrote.
Florida Rep. Francis Rooney
Rooney, 66, told CNN in October he was “thinking about” voting in favor of Trump’s impeachment in the House before announcing his retirement from Congress the following day. While he didn’t support either impeachment article, the chairman of the bipartisan House Climate Solutions Caucus, who was elected to his Fort Meyers-area House seat in 2016, had also expressed “serious concerns” about the Trump administration’s move to nix methane federal regulations governing the potent greenhouse gas.
Rooney is retiring from Congress after 2020.
Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger
In the fall, Kinzinger, 41, another Trump administration foreign policy critic, denounced the president for suggesting impeachment would result in “civil war like fracture” in the country. “I have visited nations ravaged by civil war. I have never imagined such a quote to be repeated by a President. This is beyond repugnant,” tweeted the lawmaker, who’s represented the region southwest of Chicago since 2011.
The congressman additionally wasn’t shy about voicing his displeasure with Trump’s decision to host the G-7 summit at one of his Florida properties before changing the location to Camp David after several Republicans complained about conflicts of interest.
[Read more: Enough wrath for all: Six times Trump attacked his friends]
