Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh said he is joining the Democratic Party, five years after he left the Republican Party.

Walsh, who came up in politics during the Tea Party movement but has since emerged as a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, said he was joining the party after five years of being an independent. In a post to his Substack, Walsh wrote, “Three words I never thought I’d ever utter: I’m a Democrat.”

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“The stakes are simply too high to NOT become a Democrat. Let me explain why,” he wrote. “Let’s start with the obvious—a tyrant sits in the White House. The very thing our Founders feared most is here.”

Walsh said he was still the “same passionate TEA partier who went to Congress in 2010 to fight against our out-of-control debt and fight for a more efficient government.”

“I’m still a border hawk, an unabashed gun rights advocate, and an unyielding defender of free speech,” he wrote, but added “I’ve opened my eyes and listened to people who don’t think like me. And by doing so, I gained a greater understanding of and appreciation for LGBTQ issues, structural racism, the need for empathetic immigration reform, the dangers of climate change, and the role government must play to help care for the neediest and most vulnerable among us.”

Walsh served in the House representing an Illinois congressional district from 2011-2013. He has been an outspoken critic of Trump for the last seven years.

Walsh was a supporter of Trump early in his first administration, but later turned critical of him about halfway through Trump’s first term. He launched an unsuccessful primary challenge to Trump in 2020 and left the Republican Party shortly thereafter, endorsing former President Joe Biden for president.

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“I’m still a conservative, but I’m not a conservative jerk. For the past seven years, I’ve been on a mission to help heal the divide in this country—the divide I helped to create,” Walsh wrote.

“Decency, tolerance, understanding, empathy…I now get how vital these all are to our politics, and there’s only one political party these days that values and practices these traits—the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “Donald Trump is the worst of us, and, sadly, the rest of the Republican Party emulates his cruelty, dishonesty, and authoritarianism.”