Jenna Ellis, the counsel for the former president, is facing criminal charges related to attempted election subversion that resulted in Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over the former president. Ellis asserts that Trump is a “malignant narcissist” incapable of accepting responsibility for his mistakes, and she will not continue to support him.
Ellis declared, “I simply can’t support him for elected office again.” “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”
The 38-year-old Ellis was addressing the conservative evangelical network administered by the American Family Association, a non-profit organization that claims to have been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977, during her program on American Family Radio.
Ellis was one of the eighteen Trump advisers indicted alongside him in Georgia for allegedly attempting to overturn Biden’s victory there. She was charged with violating state anti-racketeering statutes and encouraging a public official to lie under oath. She was granted $100,000 bond and pleaded not guilty.
Trump entered a not guilty plea to thirteen counts of conspiracy and extortion.
In addition to four federal counts related to election subversion, forty federal counts related to the retention of classified information, and thirty-four state counts in New York over hush-money payments, he is also facing civil cases involving a $250 million lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general over his business affairs and a defamation suit stemming from a rape allegation a judge deemed “substantially true.”
Trump leads by a wide margin in national and significant state surveys for the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Ellis’s assertions that he is a constitutional jurist have been widely contested. Ellis was formerly a counsel for the Catholic conservative organization Thomasasca ABC.
Reportedly, Ellis was “a lawyer whom Trump sought out after seeing her television commentary” by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. In 2020, Ellis emerged from relative obscurity to join what she dubbed a “elite strike force team” that was attempting to reverse Trump’s defeat by Biden.
It was not a triumph. In December of the previous year, Ellis joined American Family Radio. On Thursday, she spoke with another right-wing presenter, Steve Deace, on her program.
“Before that man [Trump] needs to be president again,” Deace stated. [to] avoid the, quote-unquote, “witch-hunts,” where man once more requires Jesus because—spoil alert—exhibiting some self-awareness would feed his desires. In addition, he refuses to acknowledge that he is not God.
Deace had “exactly articulated exactly how I as a voter feel,” according to Ellis. She added that she had a close friendship and professional relationship with Trump, adding, “I have great love and respect for him personally.”
“However, I completely agree with everything you just said, which is why I am unable to continue to support him for public office. That, quite frankly, malignant narcissistic inclination to just assert that he’s never done anything wrong is why I’ve decided to distance myself from him.
“And the total idolatry that I’m seeing from some of the supporters that are unwilling to put the constitution and the country and the conservative principles above their love for a star is really troubling.
“And I think that we do need to, as Americans and as conservatives and particularly as Christians, take this very seriously and understand where are we putting our vote.”