GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez Warns Trump Will ‘Try To Steal’ Next Election

Retiring Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) is warning fellow Republicans that former President Donald Trump will try to steal the next election

Gonzalez was one of ten Republicans who voted to impeach the former president, and he is now choosing to retire after facing relentless attacks and threats against him and his family, calling Trump a “cancer” on the party.

“January 6 was an unconstitutional attempt led by the President of the United States to overturn an American election and reinstall himself in power illegitimately,” Gonzalez told CNN. “That’s fallen nation territory, that’s third world country territory. My family left Cuba to avoid that fate. I will not let it happen here. I think it’s all pushing towards one of two outcomes: He either wins legitimately, which he may do, or if he loses again, you just try to steal it.”

Gonzalez added: “The institutions don’t hold themselves. In the moments of truth, you need the right people to pass the most difficult tests. We had just enough people on January 6 to pass the test. We have to make sure we have an equal number of people to continue to pass the test going forward. It looks to me that he has evaluated what went wrong on January 6: Why is it that he wasn’t able to steal the election? Who stood in his way? And he’s going methodically state by state at races from, you know, state Senate races all the way down to county commissioner races trying to get the people who — the Republicans, the RINOs, in his words — who stopped this, who stopped him from stealing the election.”

Rep. Liz Cheney, who was kicked out of House GOP leadership over her criticism of Trump, echoed Gonzalez’s statements: “I’m afraid that the kind of political violence, the kind of abandonment of the rule of law, the kind of abandonment of the constitution that we watched, does threaten the foundations of democracy, the foundations of our system. And the fact that so many in my party are willing to be silent, are complicit, are enabling it, adds very much to the peril.”

Article by Elizabeth Letsou