Former Republican National Committee head Michael Steele appeared on MSNBC on Sunday and took aim at supporters of President Donald Trump , who he believes are being scammed by the real estate mogul, Raw Story reported.
“Y’all want to play this game that Donald Trump is like you? You’re stupid. You’re being played. You’re getting punked,” he said.
“What’s so bad about it is you’re complicit in your own punking. And those who have said I’m not doing that because that’s not me, understand why: we refuse to collaborate.”
Earlier in the interview, Steele — who has been a Republican for over 40 years — took aim at Trump’s political affiliation, which he suggested is not reflective of his true political beliefs.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to cede that ground to Donald Trump who is not now nor has he ever been a Republican. Who is not now nor ever been a conservative.”
Steele’s sentiments on Trump have been echoed by others. As reported by Politico , longtime GOP operative Stuart Stevens claimed that Trump has been running a presidency that throws away the traditional values of the party — family values, free trade, and limited government — and “destroyed conservatism.”
Stevens, who has compared the Republican Party in some ways to Nazi Germany, claimed that many of his former colleagues all believe that the modern GOP has taken a turn for the worse.
“They all know something wrong has happened in the party,” he said.
As reported by CNN , Trump previously claimed to identify more with the Democratic Party in a 2004 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. He claimed that the economy appears to do better under Democratic leadership and pointed to the purported disasters that have taken place under Republican leadership.
Still, amid worries that the Republican Party will suffer a massive electoral wipeout in November, some believe that Trump’s form of conservatism is here to stay. Per Politico , the recent wave of congressional candidates that adopt Trump’s political strategy has been clearing out older members of the party and suggesting that this new GOP is not going to disappear anytime soon.
Others, such as Nigel Farage , continue to support the president amid low polling and suggest that the real estate mogul is on track to win an upset victory as he did in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. Farage notably led the United Kingdom out of the European Union via Brexit, which polling suggested was a losing issue among the general population of the country.
