Former Republican sounds alarm about 'radicalized' GOP base

A conservative offered a news flash about the "completely radicalized" state of the Republican Party Tuesday.

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh watched in shock and horror at the rantings and ravings of Donald Trump and others at last weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference, and while he found their outlandish statements "eminently mockable," he cautioned in a new column for The Bulwark that it would be a mistake to write them off as some lunatic fringe.

"So yeah, I get it," Walsh wrote. "CPAC was, once again, a boiling cauldron of bats--t-crazy stew. But we can’t let the laughter and the richly deserved mockery lead us to not take these people seriously, to dismiss them. To do so would be a mistake — the sort of mistake that put Donald Trump in the White House in 2016 and almost kept him there in 2020."

For better or worse, he pointed out, the U.S. has two political parties -- and one of them has been taken over by Trump and others, like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, who once might have been consigned to the margins but are now mainstream politicians with real influence over the GOP.

"One of our two major political parties is radicalized," Walsh wrote. "That political party controls the House of Representatives and has a decent chance of taking back control of the Senate in 2024. It also has a very real chance of taking back the White House in 2024. And the man responsible for a violent attempt to overthrow an American election two years ago is the clear frontrunner for the GOP nomination."

What took place at CPAC isn't just some embarrassing spectacle, he argued -- it offered a window into the conspiratorial and vengeful mindset that shapes the Republican Party.

"Donald Trump is a big problem," Walsh wrote. "The millions and millions who support him are an even bigger problem. But the millions and millions who still don’t know how or why anyone could support Trump are the biggest problem. The base of my former political party needs to be defeated. And in order to defeat them, we need to understand them and take them seriously."