Jeffrey Caplan
Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” recently left the Republican Party because of his disgust for President Trump. On Sunday, the commentator put his words in black and white in a scathing op-ed piece published in the Washington Post.
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The title of his piece: “Trump is Killing the Republican Party.”
Scarborough accused Trump of being a Democrat who switched parties “after the promotion of a racist theory about Barack Obama,” and he railed on Republican members of Congress who have “shamelessly” stood by the president.
For years before becoming president, Trump infamously fanned the flames of the so-called Birther movement, a conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States and thus was ineligible to be president.
Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Florida who served four terms starting in 1994. He announced his decision to leave the party last week during an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Scarborough was joined by morning show co-host and fiancée Mika Brzezinski, who has been attacked on Twitter by Trump.
“It is a dying party that I can no longer defend,” Scarborough, who plans to register as an independent, wrote in the op-ed. “I am a Republican, but I’m not going to be a Republican anymore.”
Scarborough wrote in his opening paragraph:
I did not leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left its senses. The political movement that once stood athwart history resisting bloated government and military adventurism has been reduced to an amalgam of talk-radio resentments. 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 chastised Republican congressmen on multiple fronts, including for remaining silent as Trump went to war against the free press — calling the media the “enemy of the people” — for their silence on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and for ignoring mounting evidence that the Trump campaign might have colluded with the Russians.
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He declared that Trump will destroy the party he once represented.
“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,” Scarborough wrote. “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.”
