Franklin Graham no longer considers himself a Republican.
Evangelist Franklin Graham has announced he is abandoning the Republican Party in disgust over the move by the GOP-led Congress last week to pass a budget that Graham said was “wasteful” and provided funding for Planned Parenthood, which he compared to the Nazis.
Graham has previously said he has no faith in any political party, but his apparent renunciation of his Republican affiliation is an indication of anger on the right and the strong interest many disaffected evangelicals have shown in populist outsiders such as Donald Trump.
So: Graham is severing ties with the Republican Party because they aren’t crazy enough, while people like Michael Hamar and I have stopped calling ourselves Republicans because they are too crazy.
With luck, millions more evangelicals will follow Graham’s lead and abandon the party, and the Republicans will go back to behaving like the educated, pragmatic, forward-looking realists they used to be.