MSNBC’s Joy Reid, joined by her colleague Nicolle Wallace, called for the de-Baathification and scouring of the current Republican Party following four years of leadership under President Donald Trump.
“I wonder if you have thought through kind of how Republicans begin what someone on my team earlier today called de-Baathification of the Republican Party?” Reid asked Wallace on Wednesday night, likening the GOP to Iraq’s Ba’ath Party and suggesting Republican influence and ideology needs to be eradicated from American society the same way Iraq sought to remove the Ba’ath Party influence from its own politics.
During de-Baathification in 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq ordered that all public-sector workers associated with the party were to be stripped of their jobs and banned from future public-sector employment. That transition government also offered rewards for information leading to “the capture of senior members of the Baath party and individuals complicit in the crimes of the former regime.”
Reid also questioned the role of NeverTrumper Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in the future of a GOP scrubbed of Trump’s influence and supporters, celebrating the representative’s letter calling for Trump’s impeachment.
“I wonder if Liz Cheney, her statement being the thing that Republicans used — the Democrats used, sorry — to explain why they needed to impeach Donald Trump, is there a little wing of the Republican Party that you think can do this sort of de-Baathification of the party? And can it work at this point?” Reid asked.
Wallace agreed, echoing Reid’s points about Cheney and saying the Republican Party needs to be reevaluated because it is “top to the bottom corrupted by Trumpism.”
“I think the challenge is that the rot is from the grassroots all the way to the presidency. So the rot is at every layer,” Wallace said. “You can call it rot because it’s now criminal sedition. But there are people that supported it from the grassroots all the way up through to the White House.”
“What became clear to me today is that whatever party Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney think they’re in, it isn’t the same party that Don Jr.’s going to run under. So I think you see the beginning of the end of one banner flying over Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. That banner will not be the name of the party that describes both of them years from today,” Wallace concluded.