U.S. President Donald Trump reacts at the end of the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 24, 2026. REUTERS KEVIN LAMARQUE
Former Kansas governor Bill Graves is a Republican with a growing hostile attitude toward President Donald Trump and the Republicans who unfailingly enable him.
“The Republican Party to me today feels like sort of a bad frat party,” said Graves on the Thursday night edition of Erin Burnett Out Front. “Everybody sort of just full of this joy and enthusiasm about how great things are going. And they're not really grasping the struggles that are going on every day for everyday Americans.”
“I don't recognize this Republican Party,” Graves insisted. “I'm still a Republican, and I intend to stay one. But I'm hoping the Republican Party trends back more towards me than further away from me.”
Graves said he lamented the “corruption and ineptitude” coming from the White House, and he said the party was failing the balance of power system that made the U.S. a functional democracy for so long.
“I've got a tremendous respect for the balance of powers in our in our nation. And right now, the Republicans in Congress have simply given away, have walked away from their responsibility to be the check and balance against this executive branch. And that is wrong. And it needs to be rectified.”
Graves, who served two terms as Republican secretary of state in Kansas, as well as governor, also worked as a poll worker during the 2020 presidential election, which Trump claims he won despite proof that Biden was the victor. Now Graves says he is alarmed by Trump’s persistent claim that the 2020 election was “rigged,” and he is furious that Trump is talking about installing federal agents at polling sites, and claiming voter data.
Burnett pointed out that “no one even knows whether Trump believes his own lies about the election, but she noted that Trump has called mail-in voting "cheating," even though Trump himself votes by mail.
Graves said he served with 49 other state election officials, both Republican and Democrat, every one of them with “hundreds, if not thousands of county clerks.”
“Do you know who were administering elections at the local level? The volunteers. And what the president says in all those instances is such a disservice to all the people who work so hard to make sure we have free and fair elections in this country. And I wanted to see for myself, so I did volunteer and work for two and a half weeks in advance voting, and it is a remarkable system. I'm proud of the people that I worked with,” said Graves, his voice growing stern.
“The president, every time he talks, does a great disservice to all those people and to our process. And the fact is, he lost fair and square, and the fact that he can't man up and accept it is just beyond hard to imagine — that a president of the United States could be in that frame of mind.”
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