And now for a moment of clarity.

It kind of goes back to, you know, my time as national chairman and certainly my time even before then, involved in the party and watching its evolution,

is grappling with certain truths that it either did not want to address directly or try to set aside.

And my friend Eddie Glaude is on with us, and he and I have had this conversation over a number of years and have challenged each other in the thinking around this.

And that is maybe, just maybe, that that blood supply that you refer to was bad from the

beginning. And that this idea that this party ever stood for those things, that it fell so

quickly away from really mattered that maybe maybe the political expediency was propping up

this idea of the Constitution, propping up this idea of the rule of law, propping up this idea

of individual liberties and responsibilities in a manner that would never lead it to impinge upon the the individuals in this

country against their rights and support the government taking control of those rights.

Maybe that was the fallacy.

Maybe that was the lie.

And a lot of us involved in this party, yourself included, didn't see that or were just really idealistic in our view saying, yeah, this is what we're all going for.

But in reality, the subtext was, no, that's not what it's about.

And then Trump pulled back that curtain and exposed the truth of what the party was always about.

And actually there's historic relevancy to that.

When you look at the capitulation after the Civil War,

how quickly that happened for so many Republicans who turned aside

reconstruction, the capitulation on civil rights, Republicans who turned away from the very

fight for the liberty and freedom of African Americans, the capitulation for the rule of law,

with allowing someone like a Nixon and now a Trump to actually be the standard bearer of the party,

Barry Goldwater stripping away the party's relevancy on civil rights,

...