Former 2008 and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said it’s “no big surprise” that “bitter” conservative commentator George Will is beginning to align with Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) during an interview Thursday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, noted that Schumer predicted Tuesday during an appearance on ABC’s “The View” that the country is “going to see a whole lot of Republicans breaking with” President Donald Trump in the next several months. Will echoed Schumer’s prediction Wednesday when the staunch Never-Trumper claimed on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” that when Republicans “realize the slippery slope they’re on, away from bedrock conservative principles, I think things will change by mid-summer.”

“Donald Trump came along and said, ‘This is crazy. Let’s put America first.'”

“The fact that George Will is lining up with Chuck Schumer is no big surprise to me,” Huckabee told LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham. “Will is probably one of the most bitter people I think I’ve been around, and it’s really beginning to show in a rather unmasked way.”

Conservatives such as Will, Huckabee said, are going completely “crazy” over Trump and his actions as president because they never truly listened to the voices of the American people.

“And I think what’s driving some of these people crazy is because for some of them, their brand of conservatism doubled the debt, got us into incredible wars that we couldn’t extract ourselves from, caused us to actually lose ground in terms of economic growth, shafted a lot of middle-class workers and gave away America’s economy to globalism,” Huckabee said.

“Donald Trump came along and said, ‘This is crazy. Let’s put America first,'” Huckabee added. “And you know what, I don’t know why everybody is so upset about America taking care of America. Good heavens — isn’t that what we’re supposed to be about?”

Saying that Trump is “doing exactly what he said he was going to do” as president, Huckabee praised the president for taking concrete steps to fulfill his campaign promises to crack down on illegal immigration, promote Americans’ safety, renegotiate or exit trade deals that harmed American workers and working to boost American manufacturing.

If Republicans want to remain relevant and stay in touch with the people they claim to represent, Huckabee suggested that they begin by holding more town halls — even if these events end up being hijacked by raucous leftists.

“And I was thinking, to these Republicans who don’t want to do town halls — no, do a bunch of them,” Huckabee said. “If you get out there in the real world — if you get out of the bubbles of Washington and New York and Hollywood — and go out there to Middle America where people are working with their hands and lifting heavy things and standing on concrete floors and making things and fixing things, you’ll discover that there are wonderful people in America who are working harder than they had to work 15 years ago and making less actual money for it.”

“And there’s the frustration. And I’m just convinced that a lot of Republicans have been immune from even talking to those people,” Huckabee lamented. “And so, get out and have the town hall. Listen.”

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Both Ingraham and Huckabee pointed to Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a former 2016 Republican presidential candidate who, Ingraham said, rose from Tea Party roots before experiencing a conversion of sorts once he became established in Washington.

“A lot of Republicans didn’t listen to the Tea Party back in 2009 — the Establishment brushed them off,” Ingraham said. “And there were some Tea Party folks who got elected — among them Marco Rubio. And I would say Marco Rubio lost the message of the Tea Party in many ways.”

“The farther [Rubio] got from the original understanding of what the Tea Party was all about, the more trouble he got into,” Ingraham added. “He started to lurch toward more of an Establishment, globalist understanding. And then the core of the Republican Party ultimately rejected him and his amnesty plan.”

Huckabee agreed, saying that Rubio, whom he considers a friend, became engulfed in a Washington culture filled with out-of-touch “professional Republican consulting types.”

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“When Marco got to Washington, unfortunately, the people who surrounded him were a lot of professional Republican consulting types, who I think have done more damage to the Republican brand than anything that any liberals have ever done,” Huckabee said. “And frankly, it’s what I call going native.”

For Huckabee, “going native” occurs when a person who is “a reformer, a rebel, a true disrupter,” begins to conform to his or her surroundings.

“If you send someone to a bureaucracy to blow it up and six months later they’re coming back and telling you what a great organization it was and they just needed more staff and more money and they could do more great things — you knew that they had gone native,” Huckabee said. “And a lot of Republicans, once they get to D.C., that’s what happens. They get captured by the palace guard. They go native. They become ineffective.”

And that’s why Trump won, Huckabee said.

“We need some folks who, like Donald Trump, are truly disruptive, and frankly let this stuff blow right past them and move forward,” Huckabee said.