GOP’s loyalty to Trump has has the party in a ‘death spiral’, says former US cybersecurity chief

‘They’ve lost control’ of their own voters, Krebs charges

The former head of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, said that the Republican Party was in a “death spiral” owing to its allegiance to former President Donald Trump.

Mr Krebs, who famously contradicted Mr Trump’s claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election before being terminated from his post last year, is a self-described lifelong member of the GOP. On Sunday, he spoke with CBS’s Face the Nation about his party and the former president’s ongoing efforts to sow distrust about US voting systems.

“This is a death spiral. They’ve lost control, and they don’t know how to rein it back in,” said Mr Krebs.

“I mean, it’s captured by the base, right?” he added of the party. GOP leader, Mr Krebs said, are “afraid to speak up, because they’re afraid the former president is gonna try to primary them. And the other piece is they’ve activated and lost control of their voting base. The people that’ve put them in power.”

.@C_C_Krebs, a self-described lifelong republican, tells @margbrennan GOP is "afraid to speak up because they're afraid the former president is going to try to primary them."

Adds, "this is a death spiral. They've lost control and they don't have the ability to rein it back in." pic.twitter.com/APqsxohnFu

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) October 10, 2021

While under the leadership of Mr Krebs in the days following the 2020 election, CISA released a statement refuting many of Mr Trump’s claims about the security of US voting systems and declared: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the statement continued in a line that was bolded for emphasis.

Mr Trump fired Mr Krebs days after the statement was issued, and would go on to make false claims about supposedly winning the election that led to a mob of hundreds attacking the US Capitol on 6 January in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election results in Congress.

The former president remains banned from Twitter and Facebook for his role in spreading disinformation about the 2020 election. He was also impeached by the US House and saw numerous GOP senators break ranks to vote in favor of convicting him of inciting the riot, though he was ultimately acquitted.

Many Republican voters remain convinced that the former president is the rightful winner of the 2020 election; Mr Trump has also endorsed primary challenges against those few Republicans who publicly refute that claim, and especially those who supported his impeachment.

Just last month Mr Trump endorsed a primary challenger to Rep Liz Cheney, a vocal critic of the former president and his allies and one of two Republicans serving on the House select committee investigating the 6 January attack on the Capitol.