Jim Skovgard flew in from Casper, Wyo., to urge Pennsylvania GOP voters to vote blue in this election.
Skovgard, a former National Guard member, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but said he was fed up with Trump spreading false information.
“I want to counter lies with truth and patriotism,” he said. “You can’t represent the country if you don’t represent, if you don’t respect the Constitution. “Donald Trump has no respect for the constitution.”
He added that he would not give up the oath he took during his service.
“From my point of view, as a patriot, as a supporter of the Constitution, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, very similar to the oath that a president takes,” he said. “When you see someone disregarding their oath, you have to ask yourself, when does my oath end? My vow never ends.
Skovgard was one of a dozen former Trump voters traveling through Pennsylvania and Michigan to urge GOP voters to elect Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in November.
Trip, started by Republican anti-Trump voters stopped at a Sheetz in Harrisburg on Friday morning before heading to an event in Pittsburgh that evening.
Pennsylvania, with 19 electoral votes, is seen as a “must-win” state in both campaigns.
Pennsylvania’s vote margin has been slim in the last two presidential elections, and Trump won in 2016. 44,000 and Joe Biden won in 2020 by approx 80,000 votes.
For comparison, the city of Harrisburg has a population of approximately 50,000.
The trip is led by Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump, who said Trump has abandoned Republican politics.
“Donald Trump came and hijacked the Republican Party, and he has completely rejected any commitment to free markets, American global leadership and limited government,” she said. “These are the principles that Donald Trump completely eliminated from the Republican Party when he took it over.”
After Joe Biden’s decision to leave the presidential race, Trump became oldest candidate in American history.
In addition to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, Longwell said his age increases her anxiety about a up-to-date administration.
“If he were to go into the next administration, if he won, not only would he be as old as Joe Biden is now, right, but he would be 82 at the end of his term,” Longwell said. “I think he is a very unsafe person responsible for the nuclear codes. This is a guy who left secret information lying in the bathroom, who lies all the time, and who tried to overthrow the American electoral system.
In July United States Supreme Court ruled that presidents have certain immunities while serving in office. Longwell said this bothered her even more.
“There is no accountability now,” she said. “Donald Trump, the Supreme Court has basically given him the freedom to break the law in his next administration.”
George Conway, the ex-husband of former senior adviser to the president Kellyanne Conway, was also in attendance.
Conway was supposed to stay deputy prosecutor general to the civil division under Trump, but ultimately decided not to join after seeing how things were going.
“Honestly, I thought it was a show, that something was wrong and I couldn’t quite understand it,” he said. “But as I looked further, I realized it was the best thing I ever did, not going into this administration.”
He also expressed concern about the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“The Supreme Court is essentially saying it can do this without fear of criminal prosecution,” he said. “And that is terrifying and it was not the intention of the framers of the Constitution.”
In response to a request for comment, Trump campaign spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement emailed to the Capital-Star that “If so-called ‘Republicans’ support four more years of unfettered illegal immigration and rising prices under Kamala Harris, then they do not We are neither Republicans nor worth listening to.”
Ursula Schneider of Tucson, Arizona, voted for Joe Biden in 2020, her first time voting for a Democrat. She said years of division caused by Trump influenced her decision.
“I did it because I felt like he would work really hard to restore unity and work for all people, not just his own party,” she said. “And I think he’s done that, and I’ve enjoyed watching the way he governs.”
Both Skovgard and Schneider expressed concern about the future of American democracy if Trump is re-elected.
But they were also worried about other things.
Skovgard is a fifth-generation immigrant and he says the Republican Party demonizes them.
“It’s a whole group of people that don’t have representation, and when you attack a group that doesn’t have representation or feels fear and you stoke that fear, that’s wrong,” he said.
He said he met with two first-generation immigrants in Philadelphia who were “deathly afraid” to talk about any immigration-related topic.
Schneider cited issues such as women’s rights and climate change.
“There are literally people who have public positions, like high-profile ones, who are suggesting that women should no longer be able to vote,” she said. One example is North Carolina’s current lieutenant governor and GOP candidate for governor Mark Robinson who in 2020 said he wanted to go back to the days when women couldn’t vote.
The bus tour started in Philadelphia and will end in Detroit on Saturday.
The deadline to register to vote in Pennsylvania’s November 5 election is October 21.
This article was updated at 6:45 p.m., October 18, 2024, with a statement from the Trump campaign
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