Reacting to polling that the Republican Party is out of step with the American public when it comes to abortion rights, conservative columnist Matt Lewis -- who is strongly anti-abortion -- said the GOP has gone to such an extreme on the issue that even he can't support them.
During a Monday morning appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Lewis said the extremists who have taken over the GOP are destroying the party.
"I do believe that there is a ton of weirdness happening in the Republican party, obviously," he told the Morning Joe panel. "Like, the American right today is decadent and depraved. I do believe the pro-life cause; there are a lot of honorable people out there, good, decent people who care deeply about the life of the unborn and they want to have a culture of life.'
"I believe that this should be something that transcends just the unborn it should be part of that, but also compassion for all sorts of people," he continued. "You know, the immigrant, the widow, how about people who don't want to be shot when they open or knock on a door? All of these things are part of a culture of life. So I think that there are people who are legitimate conservatives, who are willing to lose elections if it means that they've accomplished this goal that, frankly, took us 50 years to get to. I think there's something noble in that."
"Having said that, from a political standpoint, this is incredibly dangerous right now for the Republican Party for a couple of reasons," he elaborated. "One, I think there's just a predicted backlash that is going to come. You know, sometimes in politics, winning is losing, losing is winning. For a long time, I think the pro-life forces had the advantage politically, right? We felt like we lost in 1973, we felt like Roe was not a good decision -- I think that that gave the pro-life side the energy and the ground troops."
"Quite frankly now, that has changed," he admitted. "I think the energy is on the other side. The other problem, I think, is that because the Republican party and the right have become so deranged and weird, just plain weird, that it's hard to -- it's really conflated these messages, right?"
"And so it's hard to be a pro-life conservative in a party with Donald Trump who has sex with porn stars and pays off porn stars, and with Herschel Walker, who fathered all of these out-of-wedlock children," he explained. "Then you have someone like Ron DeSantis, and, again, now I'll put my political consultant, you know, political hat on. The 15-week ban that Florida had was -- most pro-lifers would have applauded that a few years ago, it would have been a big win, a 15-week ban. That could have been a mainstream position that could have been popular or at least defensible. Moving to six weeks, forget what I said about my principles from a Machiavellian political standpoint; I think what is going to happen is, if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, the Democrats will destroy him."
'He is Donald Trump, he is a threat to liberal democracy.," he added. "Now, if Ron DeSantis manages to become the nominee, it's going to be all about abortion and they're going to have a pretty good argument against him."
Watch the segment below or at this link.
MSNBC 04 24 2023 06 46 27 youtu.be
