GOP nominee Donald Trump is receiving a lot of endorsements in his upcoming battle against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
But, recently, he received one from a member of the Republican Party who once drew his ire.
Recently, former Senator Richard Burr gave his endorsement of Trump for president. The surprising part about that endorsement is that Burr was one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial in 2021.
Burr voted to convict Trump of the insurrection charges that were brought against him after the attack at the U.S. Capitol that happened on January 6, 2021.
In July, Burr — who retired from the Senate in January of 2023 — gave an interview in which he said that he plans to vote for Trump in November, even though he voted to convict him in 2021.
The former senator said that his vote three years ago was not supposed to be “a disqualifier as to whether you can serve.” Rather, Burr explained that his vote was in protest of the decision Trump made to abandon his former vice president, Mike Pence, at the Capitol building while many rioters outside were chanting that they wanted him hanged.
As Burr said in the interview:
“My vote on the president wasn’t on anything the House presented. It was on the fact that I thought that the president leaving the vice president, without surging to Capitol Hill a protective detail, to take a vice president with a nuclear football, and to make him secure was a breach of office.”
The former senator said while “maybe someone will have a hard time squaring” the decision he made to support Trump for president this year with the fact that he voted to convict him, he doesn’t “have a hard time squaring with it” because he “firmly understood why [he] voted for impeachment.”
He added:
“And like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.”
Burr is one member of the GOP who was against Trump during the 2021 impeachment trial who is now backing the GOP nominee for president this year. But, Pence himself has said he won’t be doing the same.
He said earlier this year that he wouldn’t be voting for Trump because of “profound differences” between him and the former president “on a range of issues.”
While those two had a close working relationship for much of the Trump administration, things turned sour following the 2020 presidential election when Pence would not back Trump’s claims of election fraud.
He then rebuffed Trump’s requests to not certify the results of the Electoral College, which is what was taking place inside the U.S. Capitol when the rioters began to storm the building.
It’s not clear whether Pence will support Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, though some other former GOP lawmakers have said they would do that instead of voting for Trump.
