A top Republican donor harshly criticized former President Donald Trump on Wednesday over his recent decision to add Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to his presidential transition team, calling them “fringe candidates with fringe policy positions” who will alienate conservative voters.

“It is hard to imagine a more self-destructive announcement,” Eric Levine, a board member with the Republican Jewish Coalition, wrote in an email letter he sent to his network and shared with Jewish Insider.

The subject line read: “Is Trump Trying to Lose?”

In the letter, Levine dismissed Kennedy as “an anti-vax kook who sees conspiracies behind every tree and under every bed,” while assailing Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, for having endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the 2016 presidential election.“There is something terribly wrong with this picture,” Levine said.

Levine, a prominent GOP fundraiser based in New York, warned that Trump is now ceding ground to Vice President Kamala Harris as she seeks to court moderate Republicans. “These should be solid Trump voters,” he argued. “Harris’s lies are easily exposed if Trump remains focused on policy and records. Yet, they are up for grabs because Trump seems to be laser focused on narrowing his base rather than expanding it.”

“Rather than seeking and coveting the endorsement of fringe candidates with fringe policy positions that offend most Republicans and independents,” Levine said, “Trump would be better served by announcing he has added Nikki Haley to his transition team. It is her voters he should be focusing on.”

Levine, who previously backed Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Haley for president, had once insisted he would never again vote for Trump after the 2020 election. 

But he announced in a lengthy memo last March that he had changed his mind, “albeit reluctantly and with reservations” — citing his concerns with President Joe Biden’s support for Israel in its war with Hamas and handling of rising antisemitism, among other issues.

“I remain concerned about Trump’s relationship with the truth,” Levine wrote in March. “I continue to cringe every time he tells the lie about a stolen election. And the thought that he did nothing while rioters ran through the Capitol chanting ‘hang Mike Pence’. still haunts me.”

The letter on Wednesday suggests that Levine’s concerns have grown as Trump brings new figures from the political fringes into his coalition. “Trump only helps Harris in her orchestrated act of national deception when he embraces fringe candidates like RFK and Gabbard,” he wrote.

“As a former Haley voter and Reagan Republican, I say to you Mr. Trump, speak to me and my fellow Republicans,” Levine concluded in a direct appeal to the former president. “Reject the fringes. Fight for the middle. If you do not, you will forever be known from this day forward, as the ‘Former President.’”