Ana Navarro, the Republican strategist who has spent this election cycle as a vocal political commentator for cable news channels — most notably CNN — has officially broken ranks with her party. She’s been anti-Trump ever since his campaign’s inception, but her decision to actually go with Clinton was a difficult one.
In an op-ed published Monday on the Atlanta-based network’s website, Navarro writes that while she had planned to cast a write-in vote for her mother as a form of protest, her home state of Florida could prove too crucial to the outcome of the presidential race. As such, she decided to vote for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
“I cast my vote for Hillary Clinton,” Navarro writes. “Let me rephrase that. I cast my vote against Donald Trump. I did it without joy or enthusiasm. I did it out of civic duty and love for our country.”
The National Hispanic Campaign Chairwoman for John McCain in 2008 and Jon Huntsman in 2012 went on to elaborate on her reasoning, citing Trump’s repeated attacks on Hispanic Americans and on immigrants from Latin America. “On June 16, 2015, the first day of his campaign, Trump called Mexicans ‘rapists,'” Navarro writes. “I was not born in Mexico. I am not of Mexican descent. But I knew he was also talking about me.”
She also tells the story of her daughter’s best friend, an eight-year-old, Miami-born girl who is worried that, in the event of a Trump victory, her Venezuelan-born, U.S.-nationalized parents, will be taken away from her and forced to leave the country. Navarro then recalls a taxi driver she had in Washington, D.C., who had immigrated there from Ethiopia and worked more than 80 hours a week to provide for his children. He, too, is afraid that a Trump presidency might mean his expulsion from the United States.
Navarro then broadens the scope of her piece to include the disabled (whom Trump has mocked) and women writ large (whom Trump has allegedly groped, kissed, and otherwise harassed without consent), and countless other groups and individuals.
