1. United States
2. Mo.
3. Letter

“Hello, my friends, and welcome my Republican friends. You didn’t change. You still believe what you’ve always believed: small government, free markets, fiscal responsibility, personal freedom, strong national defense, the Constitution, all of it. You probably voted Republican your whole life because that party stood for the things that you love. So, this is hard to say but it will be harder to hear. But someone needs to tell you this: That party is gone. It’s not weakened; it’s not drifting. IT. IS. GONE. Reagan’s defining truth was that ‘Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.’ Remember that quote? But the Republican party just passed a bill that is going to add (brace yourself) more than $4 trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade. 4 trillion! Conservative economist Jessica Riedl of the Manhattan Institute (a lifetime Republican, just like you) she went on PBS and said ‘Today’s GOP has seemingly given up on conservative economics and passed just tax giveaways to different constituencies.’ And that’s not a Democrat talking. That’s one of yours. You believed in free trade and free market…so did the GOP…until it didn’t. The party that once called tariffs ‘a Democratic idea’ now uses them as a first resort, hitting American families the hardest with a hidden national sales tax on everything they buy. You believed in the rule of law and a free press, right? But the sitting president sued ABC, CBS, New York Times, CNN and others not to right a wrong but to make people’s lives miserable. Those are his words. ABC paid $15 million, CBS $16 million to a presidential library to a sitting president. You believed your elected officials answer to you but a sitting Republican Congressman stood up and said out loud ‘If Donald Trump says jump 3 feet high and scratch your head, we all jump 3 feet high and scratch our head.’ Every Republican who might have pushed back (Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Jeff Flake) was driven out of the party…primaried, destroyed, silenced. And the debt…when Trump’s first term ended the national debt had grown from $19.9 trillion to $27.7 trillion. Yes, COVID required extra spending both parties voted for it but even before the pandemic, deficits were already exploding. The fiscal discipline that defined your life, your party for decades…abandoned before the first cough. Here’s what’s true. Ronald Reagan was a lifelong Democrat. He left the Democratic party. He didn’t chase it. He didn’t excuse it. He found where his values actually lived and then he went there. Your values didn’t go anywhere. Millions of former Republican people just like you. They’ve already made this move. They’re not Democrats. They’re not lost. They’re just done pretending. You have given this party decades of loyalty. It has not returned the favor. You don’t owe them one more vote.” - From Melissa Dalton-Bradform’s Instagram