Michael Taylor — the GOP mayor of Michigan’s fourth-largest city, Sterling Heights — is all in for Joe Biden.
The longtime Republican officially endorsed Biden in the 2020 election (should Biden secure the Democratic presidential nomination) in a Chicago Tribune article published Monday.
“I think Joe Biden is the candidate who can unify all of the Democrats, and he’s the candidate who can appeal to moderates and Republicans like me who don’t want to see four more years of President Trump,” said Taylor, who was elected mayor in 2014.
Sterling Heights is located in Macomb County, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 11.5 percentage points.
Taylor described the 2016 election as a nationwide “referendum” on Washington politics and recalled “thinking this Trump thing is insane, but when it was down to him and Hillary (Clinton), I kind of said, ‘Well, you are a Republican, and yeah he’s nuts, but maybe he’ll get better and you know he’s going to lower taxes.’”
“I slowly talked myself into it,” Taylor explained. “’He can’t seriously be this deranged once he gets in there, and he’s even more deranged now than I thought then. So, I take the blame. I voted for him.”
Taylor repeated his criticism of Trump in a subsequent interview with The Washington Post, in which he also took aim at the president’s haphazard tackling of the coronavirus crisis.
“I’m not proud of my vote for him,” he said. “I’m not satisfied with his leadership. I don’t think the country’s heading in the right direction. I think he’s incompetent. I think he’s divisive. I think he lacks moral character.”
“We have a president who, in the middle of what could be a global pandemic, is really more concerned about his reelection than coming up with a plan,” Taylor added. “People want to get back to some sense of normalcy. They’ll look to Biden and say, ‘Things are going to go back to the way they were before.’”