Ex-lawmaker hides from Trump at French 'safe house' — and urges others to follow

Former congressman Jim McDermott moved from retirement in Seattle to a new life in a "safe house" in France, and he's encouraging friends back in the U.S. to consider doing the same.

The Washington State Democrat served 28 years in Congress and 14 years in the state legislature, but the 87-year-old traded a comfortable life in a home overlooking Elliott Bay and the Cascade Mountains for a simpler life in a tiny village near Bordeaux – where he feels strangely at home, reported the Washington Post.

“I relaxed for the first time in years," McDermott said. "My shoulders weren’t all bunched up to my ears.”

McDermott is now advising friends and former colleagues back in Washington, D.C., to make backup plans to escape to Europe in the event that Donald Trump is re-elected and begins to carry out the vengeance campaign he's promised.

“I get calls from my friends now who say they are scared to do what I did but are scared to stay," McDermott said. “If you can afford it, buy a second home in France, or Spain, or Portugal, wherever … a second home that could become a safe house."

Washington Post correspondent Elizabeth Becker wrote, "He made a radical leap from a comfortable retirement in the United States to a stone cottage in rural France for reasons that are suddenly timely for friends and former colleagues in D.C. who are facing the possibility that a vengeful Donald Trump could win the presidential election."

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The former lawmaker bought his French cottage on a whim while vacationing in 2017, but he still considered Seattle his home until he got stuck in Civrac-en-Médoc at the height of the pandemic, and he has gradually had his most cherished belongings shipped to the village with a population of 661 people, where he keeps touch with friends and sends campaign money back home into Democratic campaigns.

"Trump can't win," he tells his friends back home.

McDermott, who also ran for governor of Washington state three times, retired from Congress in 2017, shortly after Trump was elected president.