Outgoing South Carolina Republican Congressman Mark Sanford warned recently that President Donald Trump is a "clear and present danger to the republic."
While speaking to Esquire's Ryan Lizza in a recent interview, Sanford suggested that he lost his South Carolina primary because he has been critical of Trump.
“You’re on whatever show and they ask you about the latest crazy tweet and you answer honestly: ‘That’s crazy!’” Sanford said, lamenting that the Republican Party has become the party of Trump. “What kind of parallel universe do I live in?”
Sanford noted that he had been thinking a lot about Adolf Hitler since losing his election, but he was careful to point out that he was not comparing Trump to the German dictator.
“I came back to Congress worried primarily about debt, deficit, and government spending,” Sanford explained. “This thing, though, given my own personal experiences, has begun to crowd into that space, to say this is a bigger and more clear and present danger to the republic than even the debt and the deficit that I thought was the end of the world.”
Lizza added:
I asked Sanford: If he really believed what he said about Trump, shouldn’t he too support a Democratic takeover of the House or Senate? He paused for a long time, perhaps wondering how Friedrich Hayek might answer.“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I mean, everybody’s going to come up with their own remedy as to what you do next. I wouldn’t say that’s mine.”
But he wouldn’t rule it out.
“I’m not there at this point,” he said. “Let me just take one day at a time.”
Read the entire column here.