Republican Celeste Maloy thinks Donald Trump is trying to remake himself in the image of a "dictator" — and that the Republican Party doesn't swing that way.
The Salt Lake City Tribune uncovered videos of the Republican nominee in a special congressional election denouncing Trump.
Maloy worked in former Utah Rep. Chris Stewart’s office when the Capitol was attacked on Jan. 6 and has first-hand experience of what happened that that day, the Tribune reported.
A video interview with the Washington County Republican Women was done a few weeks after Jan. 6, and Maloy tells her story about getting phone calls from Republicans asking if it was a "false flag" or if it was "Antifa."
"Trump supporters don’t do this," she recalled people saying to her.
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“I spent a lot of time that day just telling people, ‘Yeah, these are Trump supporters,’” she said.
“The fact that the actual Confederate Army never got into the U.S. Capitol, but we had Trump supporters carrying a Confederate flag into the Capitol in 2021, was sort of soul-crushing,” Maloy said. “It was a hard thing to watch.”
“Americans support the institutions of our country more than we support people. We don’t get behind dictators,” Maloy continued. “Our loyalty isn’t even primarily to the Republican Party; it’s to America. And watching people go into the Capitol like that felt like they were proving me wrong on all those beliefs."
But now that Maloy is running for Congress, she called the impeachment of Trump for the Jan. 6 attack "political grandstanding." Now, the Justice Department has indicted him.
"Republicans are the party of law and order — and I am a law-and-order Republican. I believe the video where I talk about January 6th is clear on that,” Maloy told The Salt Lake Tribune when they asked about the video.
Maloy’s former boss, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT), discounted her claims, saying that the Jan. 6 attack was all a lie.
“They were not Trump supporters. The normal folks who were there to support the president stood back. They didn’t rush the Capitol,” Stewart said. “This was another kind of group. They were there to incite violence and hurt people.”
Maloy also has famous relatives: her cousin is Ammon Bundy, who has faced off against his own anti-government crusade in Oregon.
