GOP operative and MSNBC political analyst Steve Schmidt announced Wednesday he was done with the Republican party, telling his fans in a lengthy twitter thread that President Trump’s policy of separating undocumented immigrant families at the border was a bridge too far.
“Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump,” said Schmidt.
“This child separation policy is connected to the worst abuses of humanity in our history. It is connected by the same evil that separated families during slavery and dislocated tribes and broke up Native American families,” he added in the thread. “Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and values.”
Schmidt, a longtime party hand, has increasingly veered leftward with the rise of Trump and has now found a semi-regular home at MSNBC along with other former conservative die-hards who have found their voice among the resistance.
“This Independent voter will be aligned with the only party left in America that stands for what is right and decent and remains fidelitous (sic) to our Republic, objective truth, the rule of law and our Allies. That party is the Democratic Party,” he concluded.
You can read the full thread here.
29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.
— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) June 20, 2018
Schmidt is the latest Republican operative finally pushed over the edge by Trump policies into the arms of Democrats (or at least independents). One of the network’s biggest stars, Joe Scarborough, who served in Congress as a Republican from Florida in the 1990s, announced last July that he too was done, and made it official in October.
“I became an independent today. Here I am holding a copy of Donald Trump’s birth certificate, proving he was born in Nambia,” he tweeted.
I became an independent today. Here I am holding a copy of Donald Trump's birth certificate, proving he was born in Nambia. pic.twitter.com/9xZ6eh7Fr2
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) October 12, 2017
The trend originally began with one of the GOP’s most totemic figures, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist George Will, who dropped the party a year earlier than Scarborough in 2016.
“This is not my party,” he said after Trump’s takeover became inevitable, and urged his colleagues to “make sure he loses,” and “Grit their teeth for four years.”