Former 2008 McCain presidential campaign manager Steve Schmidt said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that President Donald Trump was attempting a “coup.”
Schmidt said, “I think one of the things that history requires is per perspective, the perspective of time, where we’re able to sort out events and look at them comparatively so we can assess their relative importance to guiding us to the place that we ultimately get to. I think this month, without that perspective yet, which will come through time, I think it’s a very historic month. ”
He continued, “We’ve seen two big things in the month of November. We saw the election of Joseph Biden of Delaware to be the 46th president of the United States, but we’ve also watched play out over these last couple weeks the poisoning of American democracy by almost the totality of the elected Republican leaders of the country. Breaking faith with democracy, breaking faith with the American republic. It may appear to be a farce, but what Trump is attempting is a coup. Period.”
He added, “What you saw this month over these weeks — it took three weeks, what 244 years of American history, no enemy could accomplish. We have — we have north of 80% of Republicans in this country, so 40% of the country believes that the result of an American election is illegitimate based on the assertion of lies, conspiracy theories. What we need to understand is that democracy is able to exist only fueled by the faith and belief of the people and the legitimacy of that system. That’s been strangled to death this month by Trump, by the Republicans in Congress, by his media enablers and it will define our politics, I suspect, for the rest of our lives.”
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