Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the Republican Party is “taking a nap somewhere” after it was taken over by President Donald Trump.
“There is no Republican Party,” he said at the Mackinac Policy Conference in Michigan on Thursday. “There’s a Trump Party.”
Boehner said Trump had been a supporter of his, and that the two played a lot of golf together.
“But president, really? I never quite saw this,” he said to laughs. “But, y’know, the guy ran, the guy won.”
Boehner also offered a theory about first lady Melania Trump:
“I think Donald Trump promised Melania that he would not win. She didn’t have to worry about ever living in the White House. It’s probably why she doesn’t look real happy every day. Well, maybe one reason.”
However, he also offered a defense of Trump on matters of policy.
“If you can peel away the noise and the tweets and all that, which is virtually impossible to do, but if you peel all this away, from a Republican standpoint the things that he’s doing by and large are really good things,” Boehner said.
Politics is “just not fun” anymore, Boehner noted, which is why so many people are retiring. According to the Detroit News, he said the 2016 election was the result of not enough people voting in primaries. And that led to candidates from the fringes.
“The way to solve this is for average Democrats and average Republicans to show up in a primary and elect people more like themselves,” he advised.