Former Tea Party Congressman Joe Walsh Will Run Against Trump in the Republican Primary

Gabrielle Bruney
Photo credit: ABC
Photo credit: ABC

From Esquire

In an appearance on ABC’s This Week Sunday, former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh announced that he will launch a long-shot run against President Donald Trump, joining ex-Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld in the Republican primary race.

During his interview with host George Stephanopoulos, Walsh, now a conservative radio personality, described his run as a necessary challenge to an unsuitable president. "We've got a guy in the White House who is unfit, completely unfit, to be president and it stuns me that nobody stepped up, nobody in the Republic Party stepped up,” said Walsh. “Because I’ll tell you what, George… in the Republican Party, everybody believes that he’s unfit. He lies every time he opens his mouth.”

Walsh, who was elected to Congress during the 2010 Tea Party wave and served one term, has been teasing a run in recent weeks. Earlier this month, he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times called “Trump Needs a Primary Challenge.”

But the former representative supported Trump in the previous presidential election. In his interview on This Week, Walsh cited Trump’s remarks in Helsinki last summer, which found him siding with Vladimir Putin over US intelligence officials, as the a moment in which the president decisively lost his support.

But despite listing the fact that the president “stokes bigotry” among his reasons for believing Trump unfit for office, the former Congressman has a long history of making racist remarks. Walsh supported the “birther” conspiracy theory and insisted former president Barack Obama was Muslim as recently as 2016. In 2014, his radio show was briefly pulled from the airwaves after his use of racial slurs.

"Found out if I said [R*dskins] or Cracker or Redneck Bible Thumper, I could stay on," responded Walsh in a tweet that didn’t include the asterisks. "But if I said [N*gger] or [Sp*ck,] they cut me off."

When confronted with some of his old tweets, which Stephanopoulos described as examples of “textbook racism and sexism,” Walsh said on This Week that he had apologized for calling Obama a Muslim, and insisted that Trump’s misdeeds had helped him see the error of his own ways.

As Stephanopoulos pointed out early in their interview, Trump enjoys a high approval rating among Republicans. This means that his primary challengers—particularly one, that, like Walsh, has a history that includes just the sort of racism that makes Trump so intolerable—have little hope of victory. Republicans in search of a conservative candidate who isn’t tainted by racism and malicious tweets are unlikely to support Walsh, and those indifferent to or disposed towards such bigotry already have their candidate in the Oval.

HuffPost reached out to the Trump campaign for comment on Walsh’s candidacy, and reported that a campaign spokesman replied, "Whatever."

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