(HorizonPost.com) – Former Trump national security advisor John Bolton last week suggested that the Republican Party should select a different nominee in light of Donald Trump’s conviction in the Manhattan hush money trial.
Bolton, a longtime vocal critic of the former president, appeared on CNN last Wednesday while the jury was still deliberating the case and warned that a conviction would hurt Trump’s chances among independent voters in November.
The former UN ambassador told CNN host Kaitlin Collins that most independent voters would not consider voting for a convicted felon. Bolton argued that while Trump’s base might get fired up by a conviction, having a convicted felon, particularly the first former president to be convicted, would not be “a good look” under “any circumstances.”
The following day, after the jury convicted Trump, Bolton repeated his demand that the Republican National Committee replace the former president as its nominee.
In a May 30 post on X, Bolton described the guilty verdict as a “fire-bell in the night” and urged the Republicans to “change course” rather than “nominate a convicted felon for President.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s conviction appeared to unify the various factions of the GOP on Capitol Hill, with even moderate Republican Susan Collins blasting the guilty verdict and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for bringing the case in the first place. Collins accused Bragg of bringing the charges not because of any specific criminal conduct but “because of who the defendant was.”
The Trump campaign announced last Friday that in the first 24 hours after the verdict, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign raked in $52.8 million.
The official tally of fundraising won’t be verified until after the RNC and the Trump campaign file their May donations reports with the Federal Election Commission last this month. However, the campaign reported last Friday that most of the fundraising haul came from small-dollar donors, including about 30 percent who had never donated through the WinRed website before.
The flood of donations was so intense that not long after the verdict was announced, the WinRed site briefly crashed.
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