Sixty to 70 former George W. Bush administration officials are leaving the Republican Party or cutting their ties to it.
Welcome to the un-party, pals!
Reuters this morning:
Dozens of Republicans in former President George W. Bush’s administration are leaving the party, dismayed by a failure of many elected Republicans to disown Donald Trump after his false claims of election fraud sparked a deadly storming of the U.S. Capitol last month.
These officials, some who served in the highest echelons of the Bush administration, said they had hoped that a Trump defeat would lead party leaders to move on from the former president and denounce his baseless claims that the November presidential election was stolen.
That did not happen. (You may have noticed.) So they are bailing. A few have registered as independents, a dozen former officials told Reuters.
“The Republican Party as I knew it no longer exists. I’d call it the cult of Trump,” said Jimmy Gurulé, who was Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in the Bush administration.
It is still not a lot of switchers. “This is not a party in collapse,” write Philip Bump and Lenny Bronner. Not yet anyway.