WATCH: Joe Manchin Takes The Gloves Off, Eviscerates His Party In Major CNN Interview

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) isn’t suffering fools lightly on his way out the door, ripping Democrats for elevating a minority of progressive elitists who cost their party control of the Senate and have fallen badly out of touch with regular Americans.

Manchin, who unenrolled from the Democratic Party earlier this year and will be retiring from office next month, flashed his temper in a wide-ranging CNN interview as he saddled up to a bar and declared himself glad to soon be rid of “the worst performing Congress in the history of the United States of America.” Asked if he still considers himself a Democrat despite dropping the official affiliation, Manchin said he’s embarrassed by what his longtime political home has become.

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“I am not a Democrat in the form of… what the Democratic Party has turned itself into, the national brand, absolutely not,” he told reporter Manu Raju in a segment that aired on Sunday. “Here’s what I told them: I said ‘you oughta figure out how you lost somebody like me.'” Born into Appalachian poverty, Manchin was raised by a grandfather whose unflinching devotion to FDR and JFK offered him a worldview into how Democrats of yore mobilized the federal government to lift millions out of poverty and install safety net programs like Social Security that still remain a bedrock for most American families. “But there was a split” in the party during his decades in office, Manchin continued. “I was never in the liberal side of it. I was never in the establishment side.”

“The D-brand has been so maligned from the standpoint of, it’s just, it’s toxic.” Today, he observed, too many party faithful living on the far left are “trying to make me think it’s the norm.”

“No. I will protect you, just don’t try to mainstream it. And the Democratic Party, the Washington Democrats, have tried to mainstream the extreme,” he added. Asked to define the party’s brand in a few words, Manchin didn’t hold back. “It’s basically infringement on me making decisions,” he replied, contrasting the egalitarian priorities of his boyhood Democratic Party with the elitist ones he sees today. Progressives have coopted an ideology based on fairness and distorted it to “tell you how to live your life” in order to accommodate a small minority, he explained. And where West Virginia once counted three in four voters as Democrats, today Manchin’s electorate views his party has more focused on providing handouts to “people who don’t work or won’t work.”

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Manchin’s retirement led to an easy pickup in a red state for Senate Republicans who next year will count his replacement, Senator-elect Jim Justice (R-WV), in their ranks. Senate Democrats lost the majority, a blow coupled with Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss that has triggered recriminations among party leaders eager to assign blame rather than look inward and reflect on how their party drifted so far from the mainstream.

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