Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) offered one of the more personal attacks on former President Trump on Monday, saying he had the values of an “axe murderer.”
In an interview on CNN’s “The Source,” Duncan, a frequent Trump critic, said Republicans now face their final opportunity to decide the fate of the party and called on his fellow conservatives to deny the 2024 GOP presidential nomination to Trump, whom Duncan called a “fake Republican.”
“As a Republican, the dashboard is going off with lights and bells and whistles telling us all the warning things we need to know,” he said in the interview, noting the 91 criminal charges Trump faces from various probes in New York, Georgia and by the federal government, and the fact that Trump contributed to the national debt while in office.
“Everything we need to see to not choose him as our nominee, including the fact that he’s got the moral compass of more like an axe murderer than a president,” Duncan continued. “We need to do something right here right now. This is either our pivot point or last gasp as Republicans.”
Duncan testified before a Fulton County grand jury in the racketeering case brought against Trump and 18 co-defendants for their alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. As the lieutenant governor during that contest, Duncan was outspoken in defense of the state’s election integrity and fought back against Trump’s false claims that he had won the state’s electoral votes. Duncan is also a CNN political commentator.
When asked in the interview about a quote in Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s memoir, in which Meadows said his job was to “tell the most powerful man in the world when you believe that he was wrong,” Duncan said he never saw him do so in public.
“Well, he must have whispered in his ear and not said it out loud because I certainly have never seen examples of him standing up to Donald Trump or the ridiculous nature of where this is headed,” Duncan said.
Meadows is also facing charges in the Georgia case and appeared in court Monday.
Duncan pushed back on complaints about the court schedule in the next several months, saying, “When you have four trials to have to compete with on a calendar, you’re not gong to be able to skip certain days because it’s your birthday or skip certain days because you got a nail appointment. You’re going to have to actually go face the music, and that’s really what’s playing out here.”