One of MSNBC’s rare Republican contributors has said that the best way to bolster “democracy” is to “burn down” the Republican Party, because it has become the home of “the wackiest wackies” and “neo-fascists.” The Republican, a Lincoln Project senior adviser and former adviser to Andrew Cuomo, offered herself as one of the people who could help rebuild the GOP after its four-year grassroots interregnum.
Republican strategist Susan Del Percio petitioned for the political arson during a special, two-hour edition of “The ReidOut” Monday evening.
Del Percio said, “I have been looking for a new word for Trumpism, because I hate it,” and the torrent of extremism “goes deeper than just Donald Trump within the Republican Party.”
“Forget Trumpism. It’s neofascism. That’s what the grassroots of the party looks like right now,” Del Percio continued.
Del Percio zinged Texas gubernatorial hopeful Allen West, whom she appeared to confuse with the late “Batman” star Adam West, predicting that “the wackiest wackies are going to win the Republican primary, but they’re going to lose in general elections. And that may not just help Democrats, but it will help the Republican Party in a way, because it will burn it down — maybe not in 2022 or 2024. But after enough losses, we can see maybe normal returning, because those neofascists will be out of the party.”
Host Joy Reid told Del Percio, “I talk to Republicans like you all the time,” and they tell her that, since 2016, the GOP is “burning, like it’s gone straight to Hell, and no one seems to have an answer as to how you pull it back.”
“Do you have ideas on how to pull it back to at least sanity, where we’re just fighting about tax cuts again?” she asked.
“It needs to burn down,” Del Percio repeated. “It literally needs to be demolished before you can go in and build it up again.”
MSNBC and CNN make little pretense of equal coverage, but they sometimes feature registered Republicans who take a harder line against the GOP than the most partisan Democratic operative. Del Percio is such a Republican.
Del Percio, who led unsuccessful Republican campaigns for governor of New York and mayor of New York City, has played both sides of the aisle. In March 2014, she served as a special adviser to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), earning a state salary of $160,000, but left the administration the following January. “Her hiring at the time was seen as a smart tactical move by Cuomo to keep her from being swept up in an election year by his GOP opponent,” reported the New York Daily News.
Del Percio has continued to present herself as an Andrew Cuomo Republican, penning an NBC News op-ed extolling his leadership during the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Andrew Cuomo is no longer just New York’s governor — he is now America’s governor,” she wrote. “Thanks to his excellent leadership during the overwhelming health crisis caused by the coronavirus, Cuomo has provided much-needed comfort and information to the entire country. He has been so effective and has presented such a stark contrast with the vacuum of leadership in the White House that now some people are saying he should be America’s president.”
The only reason Cuomo should not enter the presidential primaries, Del Percio concluded, is that New Yorkers like herself “are not willing to trade him. He belongs to New York, and we need him to stay here.”
Del Percio went on to become a special adviser to the scandal-plagued Lincoln Project. She told Reid that Democrats tell her, “Please stay a Republican,” because the party will need leaders to turn the GOP away from the concerns that animate its base voters once they are routed. “That also means there has to be people willing to keep their Republican credentials to be there when it’s time to build it up.”
Reid mentioned none of Del Percio’s associations with unsavory political movements to her viewers, instead misinforming her audience that Allen West “has suggested black communities were stronger and better during segregation, so, he’s anti-Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.].” Del Percio added that West believes in “secession.”
West has long noted that black families had a lower out-of-wedlock birthrate before the Great Society and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s — a trend observed by current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
“When I was born in 1961, between 75 to 77 percent of the households had two parents,” West has said. “Today, it’s at 24 percent, and you can trace that right back to a failed policy from Lyndon Johnson, where the government provided checks to women who had children out of wedlock as long as they did not have a man in the home.” West told Young America’s Foundation in April, “The black family is the reason why the black community survived through slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, all of these horrible things.”
West has also said he never endorsed secession, saying his political opponents twisted his words.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.