Today, I can look at my family with pride in the knowledge that last November, I, a Republican my entire adult life, opposed the election of Donald Trump as president.

I say that after Tuesday, August 15, one of the most shameful and sickening days in the history of American politics.  The President of the United States made it clear that he has an implicit alliance with Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists.  The bigots and hate-mongers of America know that Donald Trump will always have their back.  No thinking American can any longer give any credibility to the sophistry of the Trump apologists who pathetically attempt to refute this undeniable truth.

My adult life has been dedicated to the Republican Party.  I served as an official surrogate speaker for the campaigns of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and for George H.W. Bush in 1988 and 1992.  It was the greatest honor in my career in public service to have served in a high position in the administration of George W. Bush. 

My political philosophy, in a nutshell, was that of classical conservatism, as embodied by the administrations of Reagan and both Bushes and the philosophy of Jack Kemp and William F. Buckley.  Classical conservatism was grounded in respect for institutions, as advocated by Edmund Burke, an embrace of free markets, free trade, and smaller, smarter government, as championed by Milton Friedman, a foreign policy based on both self-interest and the protection of democratic ideals, and above all, a repudiation of bigotry in all its forms.  That includes specifically a repudiation of bigotry against immigrants.  

Reagan and both Bushes implemented policies of authorizing increased legal immigration.  I am proud to say that this accounted for the welcome given by America to Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union during the last two decades of the twentieth century. 

The notion that Donald Trump is a classical conservative is palpable nonsense.  Trump is, in reality, an empty authoritarian vessel, filled by the Alt-Right, anti-intellectual, economic protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist beliefs of his Rasputin, Steve Bannon.  And it is on the issue of immigration that Trump most sharply departs from Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump claimed to be opposed only to illegal immigration.  That was a blatant lie.  A few weeks ago, in the worst display of American xenophobia since that of former Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long, who barred the entry into America of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, Trump proposed legislation that for all practical purposes would preclude immigration of individuals who did not know English.  That means that in Donald Trump’s America, there would have been no place for my Eastern European Jewish grandparents, who first learned English after they arrived in America and went on to successfully pursue the American dream.

Trumpism is a virulent cancer that threatens to destroy the American body politic.  It will first, however destroy the Republican Party.  Ours is the party of Dwight David Eisenhower, who in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 implemented the first federal executive action to enforce school desegregation and in 1957 and 1960 obtained Congressional passage of the first federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.  This proud legacy will be destroyed, however, unless Republican officials and party leaders throughout the nation en masse repudiate the bigotry of Trump and call for his resignation.

Let us not mince words:  Any Republican who does not call for Trump’s resignation is acquiescing in Trump bigotry.  

And there is no more appropriate Republican entity to take the lead in the repudiation of Trump bigotry than the New Jersey Republican Party, which has the finest tradition of racial and ethnic tolerance of any state Republican Party in the nation.

This tradition was best exemplified in the first half of the Twentieth Century by history’s greatest New Jersey Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Robert Kean.  Bob Kean was the first member of the House of Representatives to speak out against the Nazi Holocaust and to call for the creation of a State of Israel.  He would have been sickened by Trump’s implicit alliance with anti-Semitic Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

In the 1960s, three Republican members of the House of Representatives were leaders in the successful effort to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Senator Clifford Case, Representative Peter Frelinghuysen, and Representative (later Governor) William T. Cahill.  Their actions buttressed the tradition of racial tolerance that gives pride to every New Jersey Republican.

Then there were the Republican governors.  Tom Kean followed the tradition of his father and made his slogan, “the Politics of Inclusion” a reality, resulting in his actually carrying a majority of the African-American vote in his reelection landslide of 1985.

And I will always be proud of the governor I served, Christie Whitman.  Her slogan was, “New Jersey: Many Faces, One Family”, and she worked every day of her administration to recruit more minorities into leadership positions in both state government and the NJGOP.

In this election of 2017, it is incumbent on the Republican candidate for Governor, Kim Guadagno and all GOP legislative candidates to repudiate Trump’s bigotry and call for his resignation.  This will hopefully result in growing Republican support nationally for the removal of Trump from the presidency.

A word is in order about Governor Chris Christie.  I have been perhaps his most severe Republican critic throughout his administration.

Yet it must be said: Unlike Donald Trump, Chris Christie is neither a bigot nor xenophobic.  By repudiating Donald Trump’s bigotry and calling for his resignation, Chris Christie can play a vital role in ending the national tragedy of the Trump administration. This will merit him a place of honor in both American and New Jersey history.  And it will be well deserved. 

Alan J. Steinberg served as Regional Administrator of Region 2 EPA during the administration of former President George W. Bush and as Executive Director of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission under former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman.