Top GOP strategist quits job as 'accomplice' to the Republican 'cult'
Story by Lesley Abravanel
• 5h•
4 min read
President Donald Trump with members of his Cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in 2025 (image from White House galleries)© provided by AlterNet
Miles Bruner, a top Republican strategist who "worked inside GOP circles through
Trump’s takeover of the party" is quitting the party and encouraging others to do the same,
he writes in The Bulwark.
Under President Donald Trump, the Republican party, he writes, has "devolved into a cult of personality that mirrors the worst authoritarian regimes of the last one hundred y
But Trump hasn't worked alone, Bruner says. "While Trump and his supporters in Congress have been the driving force behind the right’s descent into despotism, it would not have been possible without the thousands of consultants, aides, and politicos working behind the scenes to fully execute their
systematic dismantling of American democratic norms," he writes.
For 12 years, Bruner worked in various facets of the GOP, from grassroots voter outreach to digital fundraising.
"I worked inside GOP circles through
Trump’s takeover of the party, his initial downfall, and his resurgence in 2023–2024. At every step along the way, I rationalized, compartmentalized, and found excuses to stay tethered to the party, even as I grew to believe it was undermining the foundations of our constitutional republic," he says.
Bruner says he could no longer rationalize any of it, leading to his decision to leave the party.
"But over the last few months, the compartmentalization and coping stopped working to silence my conscience," he says, using this piece in The Bulwark as his resignation letter.
"I quit. I quit the Republican party and my job as an accomplice to the party in the throes of an authoritarian cult. Today, I resigned from my career as a senior fundraising strategist for one of the leading Republican digital fundraising firms in Washington, D.C," he says.
Bruner says his decision was twofold: "first, to shed light on why someone would continue to work for an increasingly corrupt and
authoritarian political party despite their divergent ethical and political beliefs; second, to convince any number of consultants, staffers, and former colleagues to follow their consciences and leave with their integrity still intact."
Bruner says that he wasn't fully on board with Trump at all in the beginning and he didn't take him seriously either.
"The thinking was that Trump’s candidacy was a joke—why alienate the sliver of voters Trump was holding when he’d be out of the race in a few months? From that point on, my anxiety began to fester," he says.
As political coordinator for Republican Janet Nguyen’s state senate campaign in California, Bruner says they were horrified at the
Charlottesville, Virginia white supremacist rally which Trump excused with that now infamous "good people on both sides" statement.
"We buried the condemnation of Trump on Twitter, believing that fewer of her Republican supporters would see it," Bruner says, but within minues, Nguyen was attacked by Trump supporters.
"It was the first time I should have drawn the line and said I quit. But, again, I stayed," he said. And it weighed on him.
"The emotional and mental weight one feels when one’s career suddenly conflicts with one’s beliefs," he says. But when a new job came along, Bruner found himself deeper in the Trump world.
"In my new position, I became enmeshed in the D.C. Republican consulting ecosystem that was now fully orbiting around Trump," he says, and his clients were "100 percent pro-MAGA."
After President Joe Biden won and the
January 6 insurrection at the Capitol happened, Bruner thought Trump would go into exile at his Palm Beach country club "as a political pariah."
As Bruner's career took off during the years after, which went by "uneventfully," Bruner writes, "at a superficial level and putting my ethics aside, I was living the life I had imagined having as a teenager."
And it wasn't Trump that broke him out of his "comfortable cocoon," Bruner says. "Rather, it was the rightward lurch of the
Supreme Court and the lengths to which the right was willing to go to undermine established legal precedents and access to reproductive rights."
Bruner says it was his and his wife's experience trying to start a family that broke him out of his staunch pro-life stance and he "slowly became pro-choice."
To a degree, I understood the selfishness of my reaction. I had been willing to work in a system and for a party that had allowed rulings like these to take hold—that had celebrated them, in fact—only to find it unbearable when I felt personally attacked," he admits.
"It is not to excuse my actions that I note that sometimes a personal experience is what it takes for an awakening like this to occur," he adds.
That's when he began plotting his exit from the Republican party, and while he previously excused Trump's role on Jan. 6, "his lack of leadership during the COVID pandemic," and his "migrants are rapists tirade," Bruner says "our nation has arrived at a moment in its history where staying silent for personal comfort isn’t an option anymore."
"I know now that if I continue to stay, I won’t be able to explain to my children why I didn’t take a stand when I had the chance," he says. "I wish I had realized this sooner and I applaud my colleagues who did so long before me."
Bruner's clarion call encourages those who care about the country to speak out and do something.
"If you believe in this country now is the time to refuse to ferry its destruction for a tainted livelihood. Take a stand. Speak out. Show your pride as an American who believes in the Constitution and the values we grew up with. Today, I quit allowing my complacency to destroy America, and I urge you to quit, too."
