Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on the GOP’s Existential Crisis

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And I guess I’m trying to figure out whether you think the head of the snake of this QAnon new generation needs to be cut off now, before it becomes unmanageable?

ASA HUTCHINSON, GOVERNOR OF ARKANSAS: Well, absolutely. If you’re talking about QAnon, we reject that. That’s got to be cut off.

AMANPOUR: And those who support it? I mean, this woman who supports it, any elected official who supports it?

HUTCHINSON: I don’t know if you can make that judgment carte blanche, but I wouldn’t want anyone that embraced that conspiratorial theories to represent me. I would not vote for them. I would not want them to be associated with our party. Now, let me go back to President Trump, though. He was good on policy. He did a lot of good things for the Republican cause, for America, that I fully, fully support. And I don’t want to distance myself from those things. I embrace those things. But in terms of how the election was handled and how it misled Americans that the election was stolen from him, we’re still reaping damage from that. And that’s what we have got to remedy very quickly, and make sure we’re not going to go down that path again.

AMANPOUR: I’m going to push you again, because the former Senator John Danforth, of course, another lion of the Republican Party, has said that your party has become — quote — “a gross caricature of what the Republican Party has traditionally been.” And I know you say Donald Trump has been good for policy in some of the instances that you mentioned. But he also was — launched a major attack on the Constitution and on your own democracy. So, where do you think the party is headed? When you see all this, plus the impeachment that’s going to happen — or the trial, rather, in the Senate, where do you see this landing? And how long do you think it’s going to take to iron out these issues within your party, to make it a two-party system, like it’s meant to be in the United States, as opposed to unelectable, as we saw in the last election?

HUTCHINSON: Well, I mean, first of all, the Republican Party had a very good election cycle, increasing representation in our state legislators in Congress. The Senate, we split. And so, other than losing the top position of president, we had a very good election cycle. We are going to go through a very difficult two to four years, because these are going to be primary issues. It’s going to be fighting for the heart and soul of our party. There’s going to be division there. There’s going to be primary contests. And the next couple weeks are going to be challenging, because people are going to have to express themselves and these issues in the United States Senate. And so — but the history of the Republican Party has been diminished in times past. They say, we’re not going to survive an election. We do. We’re going to be a major player in the next — we’re going to win