The kids are not all right with Donald Trump.
Harvard’s tenderfoot GOP elite on Thursday declared the candidate “a threat to the survival of the Republic,” while asking party leaders and fellow college conservatives to “join us in condemning and withholding their endorsement from this dangerous man.”
The decision to publicly reject the candidate came earlier this week, Harvard Republican Club President Declan Garvey told CNN. Some members plan to vote for Hillary Clinton in the fall and there is rising interest in Libertarian Gary Johnson. Erstwhile candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush had been early favorites, tying in a November straw poll.
In a withering statement posted to Facebook and Medium, the club announced that for the first time in 128 years, it would not endorse the Republican nominee, citing Trump’s “racist slander” and “vitriolic rhetoric that is poisoning our country and our children.”
Breitbart was not impressed, wryly noting, “It is not clear how many children the members of the Harvard Republican Club, who are all undergraduates, are raising.”
“My God,” one Twitter skeptic joked, “(Trump) has lost the Winklevii,” a reference to the haughty twin rowers whose battle over Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg was dramatized in 2010’s “The Social Network.”
Dana Houle, a Democratic political consultant, mockingly assessed the statement’s narrow audience.
“As goes the Harvard Republican Club,” he tweeted, “so goes the Hampshire Conservative League & the Claremont-McKenna Hayek Society.”
But to the red-faced Crimson, the “absurdly cruel” Trump represented something far worse — an affront to Ronald Reagan.
“He would be ashamed of Donald Trump,” they wrote, before accusing the nominee of “(lying) in a manner more brazen and shameless than anything politics has ever seen.”
The results of the club’s “secure survey,” conducted on Tuesday, found just 10% of its members planned to back the building mogul, a fellow Ivy Leaguer who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. Eight in 10 said they would not and the rest remain undecided, Garvey said.
Garvey told CNN’s Christine Romans on “Legal View” Friday that this is the first presidential election he will vote in.
When Romans asked whether he would cast his vote for Clinton, he replied, “Speaking for myself, I have not made that decision yet.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.