'Republicans have lost the country' – and Trump only makes things worse: Morning Joe panel

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele wrote off Republican election chances for the foreseeable future.

The "Morning Joe" host pointed to turmoil within the Michigan Republican Party, whose election-denying former chair Kristina Karamo chased away donors and competent leadership and now refuses to recognize the vote to remove her, and Scarborough said that was "a sign of things to come" in the wake of Donald Trump's takeover of the GOP apparatus.

"Sometimes you need to step back, right?" Scarborough said. "Sometimes you need to step back and go, why are things happening the way they are? I know we've all seen op-eds talking about this through the years, but the Republicans have lost seven of the last eight presidential elections when it comes to popular vote. They figured out in '16 how to win just barely through the Electoral College."

"Not to get too deep into it here, but I'm going to get deep into it because that's what I do," Scarborough added. "If you take away Ralph Nader in 2000, take away Jill Stein in 2016, get this, a Republican would not have been elected president this century. That's assuming [George W.] Bush doesn't run in 2004 for re-election. But the Republicans have lost the country. This is amazing – since 1992, Republicans have won the popular vote one time. What do you do if you know you're going to lose? You're not changing the country but will keep denying elections. They're trying to perfect it now."

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GOP legislators try to gerrymander themselves into failproof district and restrict voting to likely Republicans, and now some of them are following Trump's example and simply refusing to accept losing results.

"It's how you grind yourself down as a national party into the dust of nothing," said Steele, who led the RNC from 2009 to 2011. "The reality is there is no real runway to sustain growth prospects for the Republican Party with Donald Trump as its head. It's spent the last eight years systematically taking out the leadership that could win, the candidates that could win are losing in primaries. Michigan is a recent example of that."

GOP challenger Nikki Haley points out that Trump has been unable to crack 40-percent support in his primary wins, but Steele said that didn't paint an accurate picture of the current shape of the Republican Party.

"Here's the deal: That 40 percent is not a real number," Steele said. "You have Democrats and independents who are voting in your primary, in a Republican Primary, you have to say something, where is my base? It was actually independents and Democrats who voted in Nikki's South Carolina primary. She lost her home state among Republicans by a bigger number."

"So the question becomes, how do you translate that into a national campaign for Super Tuesday?" Steele added. "Guess what? The Koch brothers said there is no there there and pulled the money out. Where do you go now? The reality is, Donald Trump, everything he touches does die. Everything he has tried to put in place does not work. The RNC will be controlled by his daughter-in-law, basically, and, you know, a chairman of North Carolina who is an election denier. Out of the 168 members of the RNC 144 of them came in under Trump – they're all Trump's people. Where do you think this party is going to go in succeeding elections?"

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