Following three of her colleagues, Kori Schake, a senior defense and National Security Council official under former President George W. Bush, endorsed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
“For the first time ever @KoriSchake and I are casting our vote for the same candidate — She is voting for @HillaryClinton,” tweeted Kristina Schake, Kori’s sister and the deputy communications director for the Clinton campaign.
Hank Paulson, former Treasury Secretary under Bush, Richard Armitage, the deputy Secretary of State under Bush, and Eliot Cohen, a top State Department official under Bush, have also expressed their support for Clinton over Trump. This has become a trend among foreign policy-focused Republicans.
Schake was one of the over 100 Republican foreign policy experts to sign the open letter Eliot Cohen organized vowing not to vote for Trump, and has been critical of him for months, calling him “a political arsonist” who makes “unconscionable” comments about women and minorities. However, she did not until now state that she would be voting for Hillary Clinton.
“I can think of at least seven Republican hopefuls I’d prefer to have running the country,” said Schake, expressing her displeasure with having to vote for Clinton. “I wish I had a better alternative.” Despite her lack of enthusiasm for Clinton, Schake said, “I don’t think there’s a doubt that she should be a better president than Donald Trump.”
Though she does not expect Clinton to be a huge improvement over President Obama, Schake does prefer Clinton’s more hawkish foreign policy to both Trump’s and Obama’s. “What I think is more likely than a reconciliation with Trump by conservative foreign policy and defense policy experts is a slow, agonizing reconciliation that Hillary Clinton is a safer pair of hands.”
Schake says that the Brexit vote helped motivate her to make this decision. “Watching the British debate on the referendum about the EU, I don’t want to wake up the morning after the election, and think, ‘Oh my God, all of us who could have prevented this didn’t do enough.’”
