Joe Walsh: The Republican challenger who calls Trump America’s ‘most disloyal president ever’

Interview: The former talk show host tells Andrew Buncombe Republicans are ‘exhausted with the Donald Trump show’

Walsh admits he helped to create environment for president’s 2016 victory (AP)

Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party-backed congressman and noisy conservative talk show host, laughs to think he has something in common with Adam Schiff.

But they do. Both Schiff, the California Democrat who oversaw much of the impeachment investigation into Donald Trump’s allegedly unconstitutional interactions with Ukraine, and Walsh, a rare Republican challenger to the president, believe he is unfit serve.

“It became pretty clear to me to me after he won that he’s a pathological liar,” Walsh tells The Independent.

“He’s the most disloyal president we have ever had. He invited Russia to screw with our election in 2016. And he’s done the same thing with Ukraine with this one, and even China. That’s why he will be impeached. I think he’s unfit.”

One of the most astonishing things about Trump’s three years as president is how little criticism or opposition he has faced from within the Republican Party. Despite promoting policies typically anathema to it – trade tariffs, closer ties with Russia, a strategic withdrawal from the international stage – just a handful of critics, such as John McCain and Mitt Romney, have spoken out.

Indeed, the Republican Party has essentially become the part of Trump, a thrice-married, failed casino owner who for many years was a registered Democrat.

“They’re cowards,” says Walsh. “My former colleagues in the House and Senate don’t like Trump. They think he’s moron. Most of them think Trump’s corrupt. But they’re afraid publicly to say that.”

He says politicians on Capitol Hill are putting up with Trump because they need his supporters to come out and vote for Republicans up and down the ticket in November. “They don’t really give a damn if Trump wins or loses,” he says. “They just don’t want to lose the Senate, and they’d like to try to get the take back the House, so they want Trump’s people coming out.”

Without Trump’s supporters, says Walsh, “it would be a bloodbath for Republicans”.

Walsh, 58, says his former colleagues will not repeat in public what he claims they say to him in private, because they are fearful of a backlash from the hardcore base of Trump’s supporters. Instead, they remain silent, or else quit politics, as several dozen have.

Walsh is among a handful of Republicans seeking to challenge the president directly. The title of his forthcoming book, F*ck Silence: Calling Trump Out for the Cultish, Moronic, Authoritarian Con Man He Is, published this month, sums up his angle.

Since announcing his candidacy for the presidency last summer, Walsh has been hitting the ground in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, trying to make the case to voters. Today, when the people of Iowa hold their caucus, he will see whether his long-shot challenge has any chance.

Walsh and former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, another primary challenger, face a massive task. Not since 1992, when George HW Bush saw off a run from political commentator Pat Buchanan, has a sitting president faced a serious primary challenge. (Jimmy Carter was the last Democrat to do so, and faced a stiff assault from Ted Kennedy in the summer of 1980.)

What little data there is also suggests a Walsh and Weld face a march up Everest. The most recent Republican primary polling, published in October by The Economist and YouGov, put Trump on 86 points, Weld on three and Walsh on two.

A more recent poll by The Des Moines Register and CNN, suggested 76 per cent of registered Republicans said they definitely intended to vote to re-elect Trump.

A fourth Republican challenger, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, ended his campaign, which was centred on cutting government spending and reducing in November, because of the enormity of the challenge. He said it had been made even more difficult by impeachment.

“From day one, I was fully aware of how hard it would be to elevate these issues with a sitting president of my own party ignoring them,” he said. “Impeachment noise has moved what was hard to Herculean as nearly everything in Republican Party politics is currently viewed through the prism of impeachment.”

Yet, Walsh claims he has connected with voters in both states.

“They vast majority of Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire – even though they disagree with me one impeachment and they don’t want Donald Trump to be impeached – they almost all of them tell me the following: they’re exhausted,” he says.

“They’re tired. They’re sick of the Donald Trump show. Like, they want four more years of this? They don’t want four more years of waking up to his cruel tweets. These are Republicans telling me this. Even they’re tired of Trump. They’re just looking for an alternative.”

In some ways, Walsh is an unlikely challenger to Trump, and calls himself a “reformed outlaw”. In 2010, amid momentum by the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement, he won Illinois’s eighth congressional district. He served for a single term, before losing his battle for re-election.

Walsh then became a conservative talk radio host in Chicago, where he continued to push fiscal probity, while also frequently making remarks many found offensive and racist. Many of the things he said were also simply false, including his claim that Barack Obama was Muslim.

In 2014, he was kicked off WIND-AM for using what the radio said were “racist slurs”. He said he was using them not as derogatory comments but as part of a conversation about appropriate language, following controversy over the Washington Redskins’ American football team name.

The HuffPost pointed out that in 2017 he claimed Americans had “lowered the bar” for Obama because “he was black”. Shortly before the 2016 election day, Walsh said he would be voting for Trump. He tweeted: “On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket.”

Is Walsh a racist? He claims not. He says he has apologised for many of the remarks he made, claiming, as he has done a number of times over the years, he spoke out of turn.

He even says the comments and rhetoric he and others on the right used helped to create an environment for Trump to seize on.

“I have been very public in that I helped to elect Donald Trump. I feel bad about that. And I apologise for the role in putting Trump in the White House,” he says. “I was very outspoken. I said things and tweets things that I regret. And many of the things, I have apologised for.

“I think some of the angry rhetoric that I used and people like me used led to the ugliness that I call Trump. All we can do is own up.

“Some of the ugliness in my rhetoric I used in the past 10 years helped to create Donald Trump, helped to put Trump in the White House. And I do feel bad. All I can do is own it. Apologise and try and do something about it.”

Trump and the Republican Party appear to be doing whatever they can to sideline what little chance the likes of Walsh and Weld have in taking on the president. Republican officials in at least nine states, among them South Carolina, have decided not to hold primary contests.

“With no legitimate primary challenger and President Trump’s record of results, the decision was made to save South Carolina taxpayers more than $1.2m [£909,000] and forgo an unnecessary primary,” South Carolina GOP chair Drew McKissick said in September.

Walsh claims this is both undemocratic and probably illegal. He says is seeking a legal challenge in several of those states.

“This is America, damn it. This isn’t Russia or China. Trump and the Republican Party bosses literally cancelled elections. Nine states have cancelled the primaries. This has never happened before in America, ever,” he says. “All we can do is fight it, and we’re trying to fight it legally in some of these states and bring attention to it.”

Trump, known for launching ferocious attacks on rivals, opponents and people he disagrees with, has said he would not debate any of the primary challengers and sought to dismiss them.

“I don’t know them,” the president said last autumn. “I would say this: they are all at less than 1 per cent. I guess it’s a publicity stunt. We just got a poll showing 94 per cent popularity or approval within the Republican Party. So to be honest, I’m not looking to get them any credibility. They have no credibility.”

Trump may be unwise to be quite so dismissive. Though just one president – Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, who was elected the nation’s 14th president in 1852 – has lost his party’s nomination, the impact of being challenged in a primary has arguably hurt others too.

Gerald Ford, who ascended to the presidency in 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned, failed to win his bid for a second term after facing a tough primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. In the general election, he narrowly lost to Jimmy Carter. Carter in turn failed to secure a second term, after being challenged by Ted Kennedy. And George HW Bush similarly failed to win a second term, after Buchanan took him on.

And what if the highly unlikely were to come true? What if Walsh won the Republican nomination and then even the White House? What would a Walsh presidency look like?

“Whoever replaces Trump will have to try and unify the country, because Trump tries to do the opposite. He’s tries to divide everybody,” he says.

“I have even discussed even having a Democratic vice president. I think it’s important to bring America together.”

Walsh says that he, unlike Trump, is a true conservative.

“I’d get rid of Trumps tariffs on day one, because Trumps tariffs and his trade war with the reset of the world is killing American farmers and manufacturers,” he says.

“I am not an ugly bigot like Trump is. Trump wants to keep certain people out of the country. I want a strong border. I want people here legally. But then we have to have a discussion about immigration in this country and Trump is too divisive to lead on this issue. But I’d like to lead.”