Lincoln Project co-founder, former New Hampshire GOP chair leaving Republican Party

Jennifer Horn, the former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Republican Party and a co-founder of the anti-Trump GOP group The Lincoln Project, announced Thursday in a new op-ed that she is leaving the Republican Party as President Trump and his allies continue their efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Horn said she “became a Republican” because she viewed the party’s values as “a voice for equality, freedom and constitutional conservatism, with a rich history of fighting for what was right because it was right.”

“For the past five years, however, I have found myself fighting for what I thought were the principles of my party in the face of the ever-deteriorating character and integrity of party representatives,” Horn wrote in the op-ed published Thursday by USA Today. “They have revealed their impotence and decrepitude as they have fallen, one by one, at the feet of the most corrupt, destructive and unstable president in the history of our country.”

“It seems there is no assault on human dignity too great, no attack on democracy too extreme, to inspire the Republican weaklings in Congress to speak up or stand up to President Donald Trump,” she continued. 

The former GOP state official accused elected Republican leaders of being “silent in the face of this president’s most contemptuous and at times barbaric actions. They have defended and excused his impeachable betrayals.”

She added that “worst of all,” some Republicans have “openly supported his attempts to sabotage the Constitution and dismantle democracy as we know it.”

“Trump’s post-election attempts to invalidate millions of legitimate votes through an abuse of the judicial system amount to no less than an attempted coup and has been openly encouraged and supported by every level of the Republican Party,” Horn wrote, saying that Republicans have “humiliated themselves and disgraced our great nation” and that “the party of Lincoln is no more.”

Following President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, Trump and his allies launched a slate of legal challenges in states across the country in an effort to overturn the results.

The Supreme Court last week rejected a bid by Texas, which was also backed by 18 GOP state attorneys and 126 House Republicans, which sought to nullify Biden’s wins in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Horn said in the op-ed that she will change her voter registration from Republican to independent this week.

“I do so not because of Trump, but because of everyone else in the party who openly embraces Trumpism, because of the party’s perfidious leaders, and a platform that advocates against equal rights for all,” she wrote.

Horn is not the only co-founder of The Lincoln Project to renounce the Republican Party this week. Longtime GOP strategist Steve Schmidt announced during an episode of the “Battleground” podcast published Monday that he is registering as a Democrat.