On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Live,” former Republican Party chairman Michael Steele said the White House was afraid of “X-factor” Republicans Senators, who are facing hard elections in purple states, will break from President Donald Trump on impeachment.

Steele said, “There are these folks who are very quiet, behind the scenes, they’re not folks going to appear on MSNBC or Fox, you know. Some would call them backbenchers. They have their nose to the grind, but they’re paying attention, and they’re looking very discreetly at the information that’s being pulled together by the Democrats. That’s the soft spot. The more credible that information is, the less partisan it is presented by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic committees, the more opportunity there is for these individuals to sort of move out of the silence and begin to voice publicly what they voiced privately. You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. That there’s a lot of damage here, that this is a problem, and that, yeah, this rises to an impeachable event. So that’s what the front line of Republicanism is now trying to build a wall to prevent from happening, sort of putting inward pressure on those individuals to keep their mouths shut basically and to sort of solidify for Trump the stranglehold that he thinks he has right now on the impeachment process.”

He continued, “As I understand it, that’s the X-Factor. Those are the ones they are a little afraid of. They are listening. They’re talking to Democrats who serve on those committees if they don’t happen to be a member of those committees. They’re trying to get their own independent assessment of the facts here.”

He added, “At the end of the day, Katy, this boils down to what position, what posture do you want to be in going into 2020, and just how much are you willing to die on the hill of Donald Trump? Clearly, the Lindsey Grahams not only committed suicide, but they started cutting off their own body parts to prove their loyalty.”

He concluded, “There’s a different conversation when it is all inside the ballpark. It is a different conversation when it is inside the room. Now when it hits the street and it is public, the public is watching this you see the movement among the voters out there looking at this information and taking it in themselves, not being told what to think of it by Attorney General Barr, not being told to ignore it by the president of the United States, but they get it firsthand live on television. That’s a different dynamic, and that brings a whole other level of conversation for those inside the caucus room, Particularly those quiet members who live in those slightly purple districts, slightly blue districts, to sort of rethink their own political health.”

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