Former Republican congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough announced he’s leaving the Republican Party during a taped appearance along with co-host and fiancée Mika Brzezinski on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday afternoon. The full interview will air Tuesday night, but in a clip released by the show, Colbert asks Scarborough why his party has continued to support President Trump despite, well, everything.
The appearance comes shortly after Scarborough and Brzezinski’s public dust-up with Trump when the president of the United States appeared to lose the plot and began tweeting a stream of underhanded personal attacks on the pair, but specifically Brzezinski. During the interview, Colbert asks about the current state of the GOP and why it continues to fall in line behind a president that is increasingly contemptible. Scarborough describes continued Republican support as “inexplicable” and lists a series of GOP capitulations—on Trump’s Muslim ban, his silence on David Duke and the KKK’s support of his candidacy, and Trump’s assertion during the campaign that a Hispanic federal judge couldn’t be impartial to him because he was “Mexican”—where the party “betrayed their core values.”
“But aren’t you a Republican?” Colbert asked Scarborough, who was elected in 1994 in Florida’s 1st District and served three terms in office before resigning in 2001 in the middle of his fourth term.
“I am a Republican, but I’m not going to be a Republican anymore,” Scarborough said. “I’m going to become an Independent.”
