A batch of 30 former GOP Congressional members, including Missouri Congressmen Tom Coleman and Jack Buechner, oppose Donald Trump for president. In a scathing letter that has been released, the alliance denounces the party’s nominee by saying that Trump makes a mockery of the principles and values they cherished and sought while representing in Congress.

Donald Trump (photo; Gage Skidmore)

Donald Trump (photo; Gage Skidmore)

Coleman tells Missourinet that Trump does not represent the party that he once knew.

“There’s too many people who appear to be just hanging onto a Republican name only for a candidate who really only became a Republican, he calls himself a Republican, recently,” says Coleman. “He praises Putin and then he offends our allies while he’s praising Putin. I really think we’ve got to stop and think what we have here. We want to put country before party.”

Coleman says most current Congressional members are reluctant to publicly oppose Trump because they have to face voters.

“We don’t have to face the voters. We can tell the truth and I think that’s the big difference,” says Coleman.

He says he doesn’t know who will get his vote for president in November’s general election.

“I think he’s dangerous to democracy. I’m concerned for my three little granddaughters who are 13, 9 and six years old. I don’t want them growing up in a country that would have Donald Trump for president. You just don’t know what you’re getting with this guy,” says Coleman. “Do they really want somebody who is emotionally and mentally unfit to be president, who insults women, who mocks the handicapped, who would impose a religious a test to enter the U.S. and he even criticized an Indiana-born federal judge because of his ethnicity.”

Trump supporters say a Hillary Clinton administration would be dangerous for America. Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, dismissed the letter’s co-signers as “insiders” with “gold-plated congressional pensions” who are “nothing more than lackeys of the failed political establishment.”

Coleman (R-Gladstone) represented northwest Missouri in the U.S. House from 1976 to 1993 and Buechner (R-Kirkwood) represented part of eastern Missouri from 1987 to 1991.