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Meg Whitman, the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and an active Republican, doesn’t want you to vote for Donald Trump.
As the New York billionaire has careened from one victory to the next throughout the Republican primary process, mainstream Republicans like Whitman have been horrified by the Trump candidacy and have insisted his nomination would guarantee the election of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in November.
Now they’re training their biggest guns on Trump in the hope of derailing what they expect will be a disaster for the party.
While Whitman ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 2010, she has at least twice been considered a possible vice-presidential candidate: Once in 2012 when Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, was the Republican nominee (she wasn’t available), and once in 2008 by the John McCain campaign (he chose Sarah Palin).
In an interview with Re/code Thursday, Whitman said stopping Trump comes down to educating voters about his record. “People have been waiting for someone to lay out a clear and understandable case against Donald Trump,” she said.
That process got a nice jolt Sunday with an epic takedown by the comic John Oliver on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” that has been seen tens of millions of times. In it, you can learn about Trump’s numerous business failures, including his airline, the mortgage company he launched in 2006, two discontinued magazines and abandoned lines of vodka and steaks.
Many of Oliver’s talking points found their way into a similar — though much less funny — excoriation by Romney on Thursday in a nationally televised speech at the University of Utah. Meanwhile, 95 Republican foreign policy experts have signed an open letter opposing Trump in which they pledge to work against him.
There will be more, mostly in the form of attack ads on TV, so if you live in a state with a primary coming up, you’ve been warned. Whitman has contributed to a political action committee bent on derailing Trump, and billionaire Paul Singer, head of the activist hedge fund Elliott Management, has promised to make sure those efforts are well funded.
“The only way to stop Trump is to make sure that people in the remaining primary states don’t vote for him,” Whitman said. “When you take a look at the facts about his record, they’re pretty remarkable. I don’t think Republican voters have grasped this yet.”
On Sunday, she publicly blasted Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor whose now-abandoned presidential bid she previously backed, as a political opportunist.
So what’s the next step? A floor fight at the GOP Convention in Cleveland this July? Breaking from the party and endorsing Clinton? “I don’t think anyone has gotten to either of those points yet,” Whitman said. “We’re going to work on educating voters first, and then we’ll see where we are after that.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
