Republican strategist Rick Tyler was shocked on Saturday by the enthusiastic reception that President Donald Trump received while giving his address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland.
During a segment on MSNBC this afternoon, Tyler told host Alex Witt that Trump has changed CPAC and the Republican Party for the worse since he took power. “It’s interesting about CPAC,” he said. “It used to be the confab of conservatives who would get together once a year but it’s not CPAC anymore — it hasn’t been since 2016. It’s now Trump-pac and should be TPAC.
"The people there talk about being pro-tariffs, anti-justice, anti-law enforcement, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, pro-Russia, pro-autocrat. It’s unrecognizable what Donald Trump has done to the party and what he’s done to the conservative movement… It’s a shame," Tyler added.
When asked by Witt whether anything “can be done to resurrect the Republican Party as it was?,” Tyler said it’s beyond saving.
“Rest in peace,” he responded. “No, it’s over. The problem is that the Republican Party has no grounding governing philosophy anymore because they’ve signed on to all these things as I just mentioned that were antithetical to the conservative movement.”
“So it’s the Trump party,” Tyler concluded. “When Trump passes on, one way or the other, that party will no longer exist and the Republican party will have... it has no fundamental belief. You have to believe in something, and I don’t know what the Republican Party believes in or what its message is anymore.”
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