Elections

Hollywood Celebs Urge Female Elector To Dump Trump, But They Call Her A Man [VIDEO]

Chuck Ross Investigative Reporter
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If Hollywood actor Martin Sheen hopes to convince a female Republican Kansas elector to reverse her support for Donald Trump, he should probably start by getting her gender correct.

In a video posted to the Youtube account of a group called Unite for America, Sheen is seen begging a Republican elector he calls “Mr. Ashley McMillan” to dump Trump when electors cast their final vote for president on Monday.

“As you know Mr. McMillan,” Sheen, the star of “Apocalypse Now,” says at the outset of the video.

The only problem: “Mr. McMillan” is actually a woman. Ashley McMillan — whose married name is Ashley McMillan Hutchinson — serves as vice chair of the Kansas Republican party. She also has no plans to break from the Republican party by voting against Trump.

“It’s my job to represent the people of Kansas on Monday. It was Martin Sheen’s job to get my name right. He failed, I won’t,” Hutchinson told The Daily Caller on Saturday.

Earlier this week, Unite for America released a video of Sheen and a group of celebrities including Debra Messing and Bob Odenkirk begging Republican electors to back anyone but Trump. The celebrities argued that the president-elect is not qualified to hold high office and poses a threat to the republic.

Unite for America, which is backed by a mysterious group called Americans Take Action, hopes to convince 37 electors from states that supported Trump to pick someone else — anyone else — for president. That unprecedented move would reduce Trump’s electors from 306 to 269 and force the House of Representatives to pick the next president. And while the Republican-dominated House would almost certainly end up picking Trump if forced to, an exodus of electors would likely be used by Democrats to argue that Trump’s presidential mandate is weak.

Politico’s Kyle Cheney first reported the existence of the personalized Unite for America video on Saturday. The video for Hutchinson is the only personalized video on Unite for America’s Youtube channel.

Hutchinson told The Daily Caller that Unite for America did not send her the video but that people in her hometown have seen it on their social media feeds.

“I heard from people in my hometown that they are getting targeted Facebook posts with the ad,” she told TheDC.

It’s unclear if Unite for America is targeting the ad on the social media network. The group did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Americans Take Action, the group behind the ad, is led by a political operative named Ryan Clayton. He has served as campaign manager for Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard University law school professor who briefly ran for president last year on a platform of campaign finance and electoral reform.

Lessig has recently claimed that 30 electors from states that elected Trump could switch their votes come Monday. In his numerous interviews on the issue, Lessig has not disclosed his links to Clayton and the celebrity-heavy Unite for America.

The group’s celebrity pitch appears to be a waste of time anyway, at least for Hutchinson. Last week, she published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with the self-explanatory title, “Staying Faithful to Trump.”

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