Colin Powell unleashes on Republicans for their unwavering loyalty to President Trump: 'Get a grip'

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell urged the Republican Party to "get a grip" in an interview that aired Sunday, unleashing on the GOP for enabling President Donald Trump through seemingly unwavering loyalty.

"The Republican Party has got to get a grip on itself," Powell said. "Right now, Republican leaders and members of the Congress, in both the Senate and the House, are holding back because they're terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out.

"And so, they need to get a grip, and when they see things that are not right they need to say something about it, because our foreign policy is in shambles right now, in my humble judgment," he added.

The retired Army general was speaking with CNN's Fareed Zakaria at an event hosted by the New Albany Community Foundation in Ohio.

Powell — who served as Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during George H.W. Bush's administration, and secretary of state during George W. Bush's first administration — charged that many of the president's actions are "hard to understand."

"A couple weeks ago, the president put a circle around southeast Alabama, saying it's going to get hit by a hurricane. He put it on top of the meteorological prediction," Powell said. "In my time, one of us would have gone to the president and said, 'Mr. President, you screwed up, so we've got to fix it and we'll put out a correction.'

"But you know what they did this time? They ordered the Commerce Department to go out and back up whatever the president mis-said," he continued. "This is not the way the country is supposed to run."

Although Powell did not explicitly mention the impeachment probe against the president, he later said that Congress "is one of the institutions that should be doing something" about Trump's actions.

"We've got to remember what the Constitution started with, 'We the people,' not, 'me the president,'" Powell said.