Ex-RNC Chair Who Hates The GOP Explains Why He’s Still A Card-Carrying Republican

Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, has explained why he’s still a card-carrying Republican — despite his fierce criticism of the party’s lurch to the right under former President Donald Trump.

“One, because I know it pisses the rest of them off. Two, because I like to claim I was here first,” Steele said at a roundtable of conservatives hosted by The New Republic.

“I was in this party at a time when it was not easy, particularly as a Black Republican, to carry water for the party, even back at that time in the mid-’70s,” Steele recalled. “To consciously decide to join the party was a big deal. And here I sit today looking at this shit show, this absolute, God-awful train wreck … actually, a train wreck looks better than this thing.”

Steele said that “what pisses me off more than anything” are GOP leaders like House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and “the folks who sit there and wring their hands privately” to him “about how awful this is” and admit action is needed but won’t do anything about it.

Steele described himself as “kind of a Motel 6 Republican.”

“Someone’s got to keep the lights on,” he said. “And I’m standing there on the front porch, and I keep replacing the light bulb because these bastards keep coming by, shooting it out.”

The GOP in its current form is unsalvageable and “needs a political enema,” he added. Steele likened the party to a “cancer that has overrun an organ” but said current Republicans aren’t prepared to cut it out, meaning “this thing only metastasizes further and becomes harder down the road.”

Read the transcript from the whole roundtable here.