Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” former Bush and McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, who is also an MSNBC contributor, said President Donald Trump’s address on border security “jumped the shark.”
Schmidt said, “As we look at the continuing debasement of the office of the presidency of the United States, we saw from Trump today the typical lying, the racial demagogue demagoguery, the nonsense, the spinning of crises out of whole cloth. What was most apparent was the degree in which he appears to be an utterly defeated and broken man — somebody who feels the walls closing in on him. It was the low-energy speech. I suspect the political consequence of it will be that Republicans are going to crack. They’re going to take a walk in the serious way for the first time during the Trump presidency.”
He continued, “Of course, Trump claimed full credit for it, celebrated it, said he would be proud of the shutdown. And so we see now Republicans living with the consequences of having an inept lying, incompetent, racially demagoguing president talking about this issue. ”
He added, “This is a con man at work. And what we’re seeing here is that the wizard has been exposed. At rally after rally, what did he say? Many billions of times the Mexicans would pay for the wall. Where are the pesos? He’s talking about $5 billion when he told the American people over and over again that there would be a wall, a wall paid for by Mexico. There is no wall. There will never be a wall. No wall will ever be funded. And he has denied this central victory against all the racial demagoguery we saw from the moment he descended the escalator at Trump Tower. It’s all becoming undone. And that desperation, I think, was on full display today. And of all the things you could say about Trump until tonight, the one thing you really couldn’t say is that he’s boring. He was just boring tonight. The shtick is getting old. It was to some degree like the episode when Fonzie jumped the shark tonight, coining that famous phraseology. I think tonight was a speech where Trump jumped the shark. ”
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