Salon‘s Charles Davis covered RVAT’s swing-state bus tour, speaking to several participants:
Free markets, free trade and defending democracy, at home and abroad: that’s John Conway’s ideal version of the United States, led by the Republican Party. In 2024, it’s also a vision far removed from reality, former President Donald Trump’s conquest of the GOP having been fully actualized, his party critics long since replaced by members of his family and others more loyal to him than the principles, however romanticized, of traditional conservatism.
Conway, director of strategy for the group Republican Voters Against Trump, is fully aware of that. He just doesn’t think that he and other conservatives should accept their party being taken over by a 78-year-old with a dubious grasp on what it takes to be a leader — “a disgusting character who doesn’t represent the best of America” — and a record of putting his own interests ahead of the republic.
“Donald Trump has really fundamentally changed what the Republican Party stands for and what the Republican Party is,” Conway said in an interview. “If you look at an issue like Ukraine, it’s unimaginable to think of a Republican Party that has taken such an isolationist turn and that doesn’t support Ukraine in their fight against Vladimir Putin.”
It’s more Russia’s GOP than Ronald Reagan’s, as Conway sees it. And he’s not alone: Outside Independence Hall, Salon spoke with a literal busload full of disaffected Republicans who plan to take their party back — by voting blue in November. It’s part of a tour of battleground states organized by RVAT, which is itself a project of the Republican Accountability PAC founded by conservative Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark and a former chair of the Log Cabin Republicans.