By Paul Rozycki

A little over six years ago, I penned an appeal to Republicans as President Donald Trump entered the last year of his first term – a time at which he was facing several impeachments. 

Today, Trump is now a little over a year into his second term, and the state of affairs is even more troubling. 

In the time since his January 2025 inauguration, we have seen pardons for those who led the Jan. 6 insurrection, a flurry of tariffs that change by the day, military forces deployed domestically, rollbacks of environmental protections, multiple government shutdowns, suggestions of taking over Greenland, and the start of a war with Iran. 

Trump has also threatened to “nationalize” the upcoming midterm elections, insulted multiple Supreme Court justices who ruled against him – even if they were his own appointees – and had to walk back his administration’s initial statements labeling American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minnesota, as “domestic terrorists.”

So, with a few updates, maybe it’s time to revisit the same comments I made back in 2020. They feel even more important and relevant now. 

An open letter to my Republican friends

To my Republican friends:

While we may disagree on many things, there is no doubt that the Republican Party has a long and honorable history. 

It led the nation through a brutal civil war, ending slavery. It was an early advocate for civil rights and racial equality in the years following that war. It has been a strong supporter of fiscal and personal responsibility, both within the government and in personal lives. It has been the voice of those who wished to spread the American ideals of democracy and freedom around the world. It has also been a leading force against those who would limit those same ideals.

The legacy of past Republican presidents

Your party is heir to the proud heritage of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. It was your own party leaders who had the courage to tell Richard Nixon that, in spite of his political victories, it was time to leave. Yet today, many of those ideals are being erased as you become the party of Donald Trump.  

You are the party of Abraham Lincoln, who held the nation together and ended the scourge of slavery, but support a president who says “there are fine people on both sides,” when responding to a white power march supported by neo-Nazis and the KKK – a president who, more recently, posted a video on social media that portrayed the Obamas as apes. 

You are the party of Teddy Roosevelt, the “trust buster” of the early 20th century, but support a president who has given huge tax breaks to his billionaire friends and corporations as the middle class continues to shrink and struggle. He and his family now use the White House as a platform to sell gold sneakers, watches, trading cards, and Bibles. 

Roosevelt was also an avid conservationist who led the early formation of national parks, yet you’ve watched our president deny climate change as he removed the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, ended the Green New Deal, and weakened the Endangered Species Act. 

Dwight Eisenhower led the nation in war and peace, and he believed that strong alliances protect America’s security. Yet, we have seen the current president work to weaken our most important and long-lasting treaty organizations, insult our allies, and cozy-up to our enemies. He has created a “Board of Peace” as he begins a war in the Middle East, and many of his actions threaten the very existence of NATO, one of our most critical international alliances.

Ronald Reagan believed that the Soviet Union was “the evil empire” and set the stage for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet system. Our current president is willing to attack and insult nearly every world leader, with one exception. He has gone out of his way to support Russia’s Vladimir Putin. 

The values Republicans support

You are the party of family values, yet you support a president who brags about assaulting women, paid off an adult film star with whom he committed adultery, and heavily redacted and delayed the release of the Epstein files. 

Under the direction of Trump’s ICE, we have seen families broken up at the border, parents – and even children – arrested, and immigrants who have been here for generations deported to countries they may have never even known.

You claim to be the party of constitutional law and limited government, yet you have supported a president who blatantly ignores Congress and the Constitution when it suits him as he expands presidential power. In fact, he recently said the only limit on his power is his “own morality.”

You claim to be the party of law and order, yet you have supported a president who has seen more than 30 of his associates indicted (and some convicted) for a variety of criminal acts. Trump himself has been convicted on 34 felonies, and more than a few of his enterprises and charities have been charged with fraud. He has pardoned those who attacked police officers on Jan. 6. His blatant lies and misstatements grow by the day, and he has used the Justice Department for revenge against those who oppose him. 

The Republican Party claims to be the party of tradition and patriotism – the flag is ever-present at public events – yet President Trump has attacked and undermined many key elements of the federal government, from the FBI to the CIA, the EPA to the CDC, the Department of Education to the military. He has insulted American veterans by saying he only liked those “who weren’t captured,” and his recent actions, such as attempts to take legal action against Senator Mark Kelly, a former Naval captain, for a video affirming that troops are not required to follow illegal orders, have undermined the authority and respect of our military and its leaders. When he hasn’t attacked a department outrightly, he has often left it understaffed and unsupported.  

During the Watergate scandal, it was the leadership of the Republican Party, who decided that even though President Nixon had delivered a landslide victory for them in 1972, they had to stand on the principles of law and decency. In 1974, when Republican Senators Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott, and House Leader John Rhodes came to the White House and told Nixon that he had few votes in the Senate to protect him from removal, he resigned the next day. Would any Republican leaders, or for that matter the president, do the same today?

The future of the Republican Party

Certainly, some truly believe that Trump is the new voice and future of the Republican Party. And the party seems to remain solidly behind him – perhaps because many of those who had doubts about him have either left the party, retired, or lost a primary election by now. 

But there are some Republicans who admit a long list of misgivings over Trump’s personality, his policy, and his competence, even if they remain silent in public and fear retaliation with an angry tweet or a Trump-backed challenger in the next election. 

Further, the president’s recent actions with the Affordable Care Act, Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland have given at least some Republicans – such as former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Senator Susan Collins, Tucker Carlson and Senator Rand Paul – second thoughts about their support, and overwhelming Republican denouncement caused the Trump Administration to finally release the Epstein files. 

On a voter level, though, the majority of Republicans still support the president. But that number is shrinking. 

A year ago 67% of Republicans said they supported the president’s agenda. Today, that number is down to 56% according to a Pew Research Center Report. 

Regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, it’s worth remembering that supporting this president is a risky gamble. He has shown no loyalty to his staff and supporters, except perhaps his family, and a willingness to throw former friends and associates under the bus if they cross him on the slightest matter. 

Finally, somewhere in the back of your mind, won’t you secretly be relieved when Trump’s second term is over, so you won’t have to explain his crazy posts, defend his personal behavior, attend his stream-of-consciousness, word-salad rally speeches, and try to make sense of it all? 

In the end it’s worth asking: do you want to be the Republican Party, with all the values that you have supported for decades, or do you want to be the “Trump Party,” whose political values can change on a whim of a mercurial and uninformed personality?  

It was President John F. Kennedy who admired those leaders who could exhibit “Profiles in Courage” and go against popular sentiment by taking a principled stand.  Though he was a Democrat, Kennedy wrote of leaders on both sides of the aisle who showed the courage to lean against their own parties  – and even their own voters – when they stood up for what was right. 

Though it’s a long shot, maybe it’s time for some more “Profiles in Courage.” I suspect that the nation will be better for it, and so will the Republican Party. A functioning democracy needs the honest interchange of ideas between all of us, after all.  

Not that I wish you too much good luck. I’m still a Democrat. 

Editor’s Note: This article originally ran in East Village Magazine’s March 2026 print edition.