A second Reagan administration official plans to cast his ballot for Hillary Clinton in November despite voting Republican in presidential elections for more than four decades.
Frank Lavin served as President Reagan’s political director from 1987-89 and as an ambassador to Singapore under President George W. Bush. After watching Donald Trump’s campaign closely for the past 14 months, Lavin told CNBC that his days of supporting GOP presidential candidates are over, at least for this election cycle.
“If he’s not actually a bigot, he certainly consorts with bigotry and plays to that sentiment,” Lavin said of Trump in an interview on Thursday.
Clinton, who Lavin described as capable and hard-working, “has just got a better approach to America’s role in the world,” he said.
He added that “no matter where” the former secretary of state stands on free trade, which he supports, “Donald Trump is that much worse.”
Lavin described Trump’s proposal to bar non-American Muslims from entering the U.S., which the Republican presidential nominee has since revised to apply to all immigrants coming from countries with terrorist ties, was “unbecoming, and there should be no place for that kind of bigotry in public life.”
Furthermore, Trump’s history of filing for bankruptcy suggests there “is something terribly wrong with [his] business judgment, his management, maybe even his ethics,” Lavin charged.
Lavin joins Robert Tuttle, the former director of presidential personnel under Reagan, who announced last week that he has never cast his ballot for a Democrat but plans to vote for Clinton on Nov. 8.
“The Republican nominee for president has no government experience and has done nothing in his career to demonstrate that he is competent to be president,” Tuttle said in a statement issued by the Clinton campaign.
