Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough told Stephen Colbert tonight that he’s leaving the GOP because he can’t take any more of the thousand excuses the party has come up with for “overlooking” the things Donald Trump has said and done.

Noting that MSNBC’s Scarborough used to be pals with Trump, Colbert wondered why others in the GOP haven’t changed their attitude, as they learned more about Trump since he announced he was running for the White House.

“Inexplicable,” the Morning Joe host agreed, adding that it was “well before Donald Trump was elected president that my party has betrayed their core values. Back in December of 2015, Donald Trump supported a Muslim ban,” which was just one of the disturbing things he said during the presidential campaign.

“In February, when he pretended he did not know who David Duke was and what the KKK did, you didn’t have Republicans saying, ‘I can never support Donald trump because he’s racist,'” Scarborough scoffed.

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And they’ve come up with a thousand other excuses to overlook things Trump has said and done, Scarborough continued, like saying an Indiana-born judge could not be fair to him in a lawsuit because he’s “Mexican.”

“Time and time again, they look the other way. And they’re doing the same now,” Scarborough told Colbert. “It’s disgusting, and you have to ask yourself, ‘What exactly is the Republican Party willing to do? How far are they willing to go? How much of this country and our values are they willing to sell out?’

“I am a Republican, but I’m not going to be a Republican anymore; I’ve got to become an independent,” said Scarborough, who represented Florida in the House from 1995-2001.

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