MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough has penned an op-ed in the Washington Post detailing his recent decision to leave the Republican Party, writing, “It is a dying party that I can no longer defend.”
The former Republican congressman recently announced on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” that he would become an Independent.
“I did not leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left its senses,” Scarborough wrote in an essay titled “Trump Is Killing the Republican Party.” The political movement that once stood athwart history resisting bloated government and military adventurism has been reduced to an amalgam of talk-radio resentments.”
Scarborough, who once defended Donald Trump and appeared friendly with him during the Republican primaries, has attacked the president on a regular basis since Election Day.
And the president has responded on social media with increasingly provocative dismissals of Scarborough of his MSNBC co-host and fiancee, Mika Brzezinski.
“President Trump’s Republicans have devolved into a party without a cause, dominated by a leader hopelessly ill-informed about the basics of conservatism, U.S. history and the Constitution,” Scarborough wrote.
He continued: “It would take far more than a single column to detail Trump’s failures in the months following his bleak inaugural address. But the Republican leaders who have subjugated themselves to the White House’s corrupting influence fell short of Lincoln’s standard long before their favorite reality-TV star brought his gaudy circus act to Washington.”
The “Morning Joe” star said the GOP “is a dying party” that he will “no longer defend.”
Scarborough’s column concluded: “Political historians will one day view Donald Trump as a historical anomaly. But the wreckage visited of this man will break the Republican Party into pieces — and lead to the election of independent thinkers no longer tethered to the tired dogmas of the polarized past. When that day mercifully arrives, the two-party duopoly that has strangled American politics for almost two centuries will finally come to an end. And Washington just may begin to work again.”