GOP Senators Privately Admit Donald Trump Is ‘Reckless And Unfit’ But Still Voted To Acquit, Democrat Says

Senate Republicans voted nearly unanimously to acquit Donald Trump at the completion of his impeachment trial on Wednesday, but one Democratic senator said they felt much differently when discussing his conduct in private.

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said on Wednesday that many of his Republican colleagues believed that Trump’s conduct warranted impeachment and that he was “reckless and unfit” but were too afraid to go against him and the party. Brown wrote in a New York Times op-ed that even if they believed his conduct could warrant removal from office, the majority of Republicans did not want to risk coming under attack from Fox News pundits, talk radio mouthpieces, and Trump-supporting “Twitter trolls.”

“My colleagues know they all just might. There’s an old Russian proverb: The tallest blade of grass is the first cut by the scythe,” he wrote.

“In private, many of my colleagues agree that the president is reckless and unfit. They admit his lies. And they acknowledge what he did was wrong. They know this president has done things Richard Nixon never did. And they know that more damning evidence is likely to come out.”

This is not the first time that Brown has accused his Republican counterparts of acting one way in public and another in private. Back in November, he appeared on the Yahoo! News podcast Skullduggery to share that Republicans would say that they saw Trump as dishonest and racist, even if they would not be willing to say it.

“I hear Republican members of the Senate say things like, ‘We know he’s pretty crooked, he lies a lot, he’s a pretty bad guy.’ Some of them will say, ‘We know he’s a racist.’ But they are not saying it publicly,” Brown said.

Brown’s latest op-ed was published as all but one Republican Senator voted to acquit Trump on both articles of impeachment, with only Utah Senator Mitt Romney breaking ranks. True to Brown’s prediction, Romney came under attack from many pundits and from the president’s own family, with Donald Trump Jr. taking to Twitter to call on the Republican Party to expel him from their ranks.

Some other Republican Senators admitted that Trump’s actions in pressuring Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden were not appropriate, but said the House prosecutors had not made a strong enough case for them to vote to convict and remove him from office, ultimately voting to acquit him.