It’s time to burn the Republican Party down, according to Bruce Bartlett.
That’s the only way Bartlett, a long-time Republican operative who served under the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, sees any future for the Grand Old Party after the 2016 election cycle.
Joining The West Block’s Tom Clark this week, Bartlett said his party has been “taken over by crazy people” who have rallied behind businessman and current front-runner for the party nomination, Donald Trump.
“The only way to fix this problem, which is deeply ingrained at the Republican base, is essentially to kill the party and I think that Donald Trump can do that,” Bartlett explained when asked why he himself had voted for the mogul.
“I think he will — if he gets the nomination, which he probably will — will cause the party to have a historic defeat. And my hope is that in the ashes of that defeat, the party can re-establish itself as a normal, sane functioning party as it was up until the George W. Bush administration.”
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Between 2016 and the next presidential election cycle in 2020, the party could be looking at a loss of not only the White House, but the House and the Senate as well, Bartlett said.
What party organizers are most afraid of isn’t that Republican voters will turn to a Democrat like Hillary Clinton in the event of a Trump nomination, but that they will not vote at all. That could mean the Democrats sweep into a position of power unseen in decades.
“From this, some people are talking about the idea of — as ridiculous as it sounds — of running a Republican third-party candidate against the Republican Party. And this has only happened once before that I know of in American history and that was in 1860 when the Democrats split into two parties and the result was the election of Abraham Lincoln.”
Backing Trump in order to commit political suicide is risky, Bartlett acknowledged, because Trump could still beat the odd, go on to defeat the Democratic nominee, and take the White House. The longtime party operative said that’s unlikely, but if it happens, America will just have to “deal with it.”
“It isn’t as though I have any control over this process,” he said. “What’s going to happen is going to happen.”
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