'One-man wrecking ball': GOP strategist tears into Trump on CNN

President Donald Trump's decision to share a racist conspiracy theory video showing former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle's faces set to jungle music from "The Lion King" was a total self-immolation for the Republican Party, GOP strategist Doug Heye raged on a panel with CNN's Kasie Hunt on Friday.

The president went on to take down this video, but a number of Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Roger Wicker (R-MS), Tim Scott (R-SC), and Pete Ricketts (R-NE), have condemned the video as offensive and demanded the president apologize for having posted it in the first place.

"This seems to be a remarkable new reality for Republicans, but ... I mean, anyone with two eyes can see this," said Hunt.

"Look, the reality is they've always seen the tweets, they just don't want to admit to seeing them," said Heye. "This is so soul-crushingly racist that you can't hide from it. And there may be caveats. You pray that it's fake. President can't take it down if it's fake, obviously. We know how bad this is."

Trump is just taking an existing problem and worsening it, Heye continued.

"I remember being in HC5 in the basement of the Capitol at a House Republican Conference meeting, and [former Texas Congressman] Louie Gohmert — to be clear, one of the leading morons of our generation politically — started making Kenya jokes, and it got eyerolls and groans. But that wasn't enough," he said. "And [former Speaker] John Boehner told him to shut up and sit down. And even that's not enough, because this stuff never goes away."

"There's also a political problem with this," said Heye. "If you're a Republican, if you're Richard Hudson at the NRCC and you're trying to get your better and smarter candidates through the primary, and you're trying to coach them on how to talk about things that matter to Americans every day, prices, jobs, the economy, here comes Donald Trump, yet effing again, as a one-man wrecking ball, stopping Republicans from doing what they should do to win elections and save the House of Representatives, if you want to help Donald Trump not get impeached, and everything else that could happen in the last two years of his primary."

"It makes no sense at all," he added heatedly.

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