The Republican Party no longer has room for a Colin Powell Republican
Powell’s personal journey from potential — and much-coveted — Republican presidential candidate in the mid-1990s to pariah within the Trump-ified GOP tells the story of how the party went from one that recognized the changing face of America and the need to adapt its policies as a result to one organized around the often-intolerant views of a single man who, it’s worth noting, spent less time as a Republican than Powell did.
At the time of his death, in an acknowledgment of how far the party had moved away from his views, Powell no longer considered himself a Republican.
Powell said at the time that the GOP had “moved more to the right than I would like to see,” but added that he still considered himself a Republican.
The rise of Donald Trump in 2016 — a man who aggressively positioned himself against the very establishment figures that Powell modeled his version of the GOP after — wound up being the final straw for the retired general.
Read More: The Republican Party no longer has room for a Colin Powell Republican