Former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh ended his longshot Republican primary bid on Friday after failing to garner any traction.
Walsh’s announcement came after Monday’s Iowa caucus.
Trump won the caucuses with 97.1% of the vote on a caucus night that saw very little turnout.
Trump received 31,464 votes. Walsh received just 348 votes while former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld received a mere 426 votes.
Many other primary states excluded Walsh and Weld from the ballot. Former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford briefly launched a primary bid as well but quickly dropped it.
Walsh drops out:
"I am ending my candidacy for president of the United States," Walsh told CNN. "I got into this because I thought it was really important that there was a Republican -- a Republican -- out there every day calling out this president for how unfit he is."
Walsh, a Tea Party conservative, said the Republican Party is a “cult” and vowed to do anything he could to help Democrats defeat Trump.
Trump "literally is the greatest threat to this country right now. Any Democrat would be better than Trump in the White House," he said. “I would rather have ... a socialist in the White House than a dictator, than a king, than Donald Trump.”
“I’m suspending my campaign, but our fight against the Cult of Trump is just getting started,” he added on Twitter. “I’m committed to doing everything I can to defeat Trump and his enablers this November.”
Walsh blames conservative media:
Walsh wrote on his campaign page that today’s GOP is “not my party.”
Walsh said the last straw was when he was booed at the caucus in Iowa on Monday.
“Leaving the caucus that night, I realized once and for all that nobody can beat Trump in a Republican primary. Not just because it’s become his party, but because it has become a cult, and he’s a cult leader. He doesn’t have supporters; he has followers. And in their eyes, he can do no wrong,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.
He went on to blame conservative media, particularly Fox News, for creating this climate.
“They’re being spoon-fed a daily dose of B.S. from ‘conservative’ media,” he wrote. “They don’t know what the truth is and — more importantly — they don’t care. There’s nothing that any Republican challenger can do to break them out of this spell. (Thanks, Hannity.)”
