Associated Press

Republicans are following President Donald Trump “over an ideological cliff,” Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough began this week, expanding on his previous week’s Late Show announcement that he is parting company with the GOP.

The GOP has “devolved into a party without a cause, dominated by a leader hopelessly ill-informed about the basics of conservatism, U.S. history and the Constitution,” Scarborough began Sunday, in an op-ed for Washington Post. Abraham Lincoln’s “once-proud party” has elected to the White House a man who gained his political foothold by becoming the leader of a racist movement against President Barack Obama, Scarborough scoffed.

Trump is failing Lincoln’s test, the country’s 16th POTUS having famously said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity. But if you want to test a man’s character, give him power,” Scarborough wrote.

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Republicans have stood by while Trump “questioned America’s constitutional system of checks and balances” and “echoed Stalin and Mao by calling free press ‘the enemy of the people’,” he continued.

“This party would be unrecognizable to William Buckley or Ronald Reagan,” Scarborough marveled Monday on his MSNBC program. Those two men espoused a smaller and more responsible government and a “rational foreign policy.” Even before Trump, George W. Bush promised to be a smaller-government conservative and talked about a restrained foreign policy. Instead, “we actually get record-setting deficits and record-setting debts and a foreign policy so utopian it would make Woodrow Wilson blush,” Scarborough said.

Trump’s budget plans would taking the country’s $20 trillion deficit and turn it into $30 trillion, Scarborough criticized. “There is nothing conservative about Donald Trump. He’s been a Democrat for most of his life. He discovered birtherism in 2011 and Republicans are literally following him over an ideological cliff. Why isn’t there more resistance?”