Key Point: “Several of Trump’s former top advisers and allies have refused to endorse their former boss’s campaign, including former vice president Mike Pence, former attorney general William P. Barr and former White House chief of staff John Kelly.”

The Washington Post: The former Trump aides who would rather not see him on the ballot

By: Mariana Alfaro

• Donald Trump may have defeated his primary challengers and secured enough delegates to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee this year, but a striking number of his former aides publicly said they would rather not see his name on the ballot in November.

• Several of Trump’s former top advisers and allies have refused to endorse their former boss’s campaign, including former vice president Mike Pence, former attorney general William P. Barr and former White House chief of staff John Kelly.

• Other former members of Trump’s inner circle, including former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson and former White House counsel Ty Cobb, went further in their criticism of Trump by saying they’re not going to vote for him in November — and that they’re open to casting a ballot for President Biden instead.

• After a dutiful four years serving as Trump’s No. 2, Pence split with Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol in which Pence was targeted by the mob of pro-Trump supporters who chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”

• Former defense secretary Mark T. Esper told HBO host Bill Maher that “there’s no way” he’ll support Trump in November because he believes his former boss “is a threat to democracy.”

• Esper previously said on multiple occasions that he wouldn’t support Trump during the Republican primary process, telling CNN in July that Trump is not “fit for office because he puts himself first, and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.”

• “Any elected official needs to meet some basic criteria: They need to be able to put country over self. They need to have a certain level of integrity and principle,” Esper said. “They need to be able to reach across the aisle and bring people together and unite the country.” “Donald Trump doesn’t meet those marks for me,” he added.

• “I will say my door is completely shut to voting for Donald Trump,” [Cassidy Hutchinson] said in a November interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, President Biden’s former White House press secretary. Hutchinson, who went on to write a memoir about her time in the Trump White House, said she thinks “everybody should vote for Joe Biden if they want our democracy to survive.”

• “He has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself,” Cobb wrote in an email to The Post last year. “In fact, as history well shows from his divisive lies, as well as from his unrestrained contempt for the rule of law and his related crimes, his conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation.”

• Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as a White House communication director for Trump in 2020 and is now a host for ABC’s “The View” and a CNN commentator, told The Post last month that Trump “is a threat to democracy, and I will never support him.”

• [William] Barr has repeatedly said that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election, despite his claims that the race was stolen from him.