Former President Donald Trump has gone off the deep end, warned former Tea Party lawmaker turned independent, anti-MAGA critic Rep. Joe Walsh on Friday.
"He’s lost his marbles, and he’s cruel. Just plain cruel," wrote Walsh, of Illinois. "But here’s the thing (and I always say this because I come from right wing media)…the cruelty sells. The cruelty right now sells to too many folks on the right."
His reaction, posted to X, came after Trump ranted about migrants in Springfield, Ohio, during a visit to California. He proclaimed: “We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio, large deportations. We're gonna get these people out. We're bringing them back to Venezuela."
The migrants in question are from Haiti, not Venezuela, are in the U.S. legally, and went to Springfield for factory work.
Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, have for days promoted a viral internet hoax that the migrants are abducting and eating people's cats and dogs. The former president was fact-checked to his face on this by the moderators at Tuesday night's debate in Philadelphia.
ALSO READ: 'I want Vance to apologize': We went to Springfield and found community hurt — and divided
When Trump was confronted over this at his news conference in California, with reporters informing him that schools in Ohio were evacuated for bomb threats over the fake migrant stories, Trump deflected blame, saying, "the real threat is what's happening at our border."
Walsh, who now describes himself as a politically homeless conservative and had drifted out of the Trump orbit even before the final straw of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, has said he believes Trump is a "traitor" to the United States, because he is the "only president in American history who lost an election and refused to concede."
