Portrait of former CIA agent who wants to trip up Donald Trump

The former CIA agent who just ran for president has repeatedly criticized Donald Trump and maintained a welcoming stance toward Muslim immigrants.

Former CIA agent Evan McMullin. Photo: NYTimes

Evan McMullin, 40, announced yesterday that he is launching an independent campaign to run for the White House.worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for 11 years before leaving in 2010.

He then worked for Goldman Sachs and became a senior national security adviser to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2013. He later served as policy director of the US House Republican Conference but left this position on August 8.

According to BBC, he was born in Utah and graduated from Brigham Young University, has a master's degree in business administration from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. When he announced his decision to run for US president, his Twitter followers jumped from 135 to 12,000 within a few hours.

Mr. McMullin has repeatedly criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on social media, calling the billionaire a "dictator." He condemnedMr. Trump's proposal to ban Muslim immigrants is "cowardly" and "ignorant," a threat to "the country's fundamental values." In contrast to billionaire Trump, Mr. McMullin supports welcoming Muslim refugees, saying it is the moral thing to do and that the United States must work more with Muslims to fight terrorism.

By running as an independent, McMullin joins fellow non-partisan candidates Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party, in a race against Republican Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Blocking Donald Trump

Mr McMullin faces a series of hurdles over the next three months. He has already missed deadlines to appear on the ballot in 26 states.

For independent candidates, they need to petition each state to have their name appear on the general election ballot. For the 2016 presidential race, it is estimated that a candidate would need to collect about 880,000 signatures to appear on the ballot in all states.

So Mr. McMullin will have to collect tens of thousands of signatures in the coming days to meet the August 10 deadline in some states. However, he still has time to have a chance to appear on the ballot in his home state of Utah, where the majority of voters are Republican. Senator Ted Cruz overwhelmingly defeated Mr. Trump in Utah in the primary election, winning 69% of the vote compared to Mr. Trump's 14%.

Mr. McMullin will also have to seek millions of dollars in funding in the coming weeks to keep up with his rivals this fall.

PBS assesses that Mr. McMullin is unlikely to win the general election, but could reduce Mr. Trump's chances of winning.

While Mr. McMullin is unlikely to appear on the ballot in many states across the country, he could prevent Mr. Trump from winning Utah and take away some of the billionaire’s conservative voters.

"If Mr. Trump loses even one or two traditionally Republican states, his path to the presidency will narrow significantly," wrote Daniel Bush on PBS.

The people behind

Mr McMullin is backed by the group Better for America, founded by conservatives in the anti-billionaire Donald Trump movement called Never Trump.

Prominent Republican Rick Wilson is expected to support Mr McMullin's campaign. Mr Wilson wrote in an op-ed over the weekend about why Mr Trump needs to "suffer a humiliating defeat" and also said Hillary Clinton is unqualified to be president.

Florida-based pollster Joel Searby is also expected to back Mr McMullin.

Steve Jarding, a public policy lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, said the group backing Mr McMullin wanted to show that "we recognize that we are in trouble and if we want to survive, we cannot let the person who has presented himself as the new face of the Republican Party (referring to Mr Trump) do well, because if he does, he could destroy our image."

According to VNE