Former 2008 McCain presidential campaign manager Steve Schmidt said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party had “capitulated to a cult of personality,” which he said was “hostile to American democracy.”
Schmidt said, “The overwhelming majority of the country wants to live in a democracy, though I would argue the intensity seems to be on the Trump side and the autocratic side of the movement. I don’t think it’s about this moment so much as it is about the country we’re going to live in ten years from now, 15 years, 20 years from now, and that moment requires us to understand it’s not some Republicans. It’s the overwhelming majority of one political party has capitulated to a cult of personality that is hostile to American democracy and is filled and teeming with extremists and making more and more intimations towards violence every day that you choose to examine.”
He continued, “What we have to understand is that despite whatever excesses you may see within it, we have one political party, the democratic party, that believes in democracy in the country, and there’s going to have to be the maintenance of an alliance that includes those disaffected Republicans, Independents, Moderates, all the way to Progressives that can stand for agreement on a compact that has always united the country on the question of how do we decide who’s in charge. The way we decide that is temporarily granting authority to people through an election where the majority gets to decide who the winner is.”
Schmidt added, “That is what they have broken, what they have shattered with their lies, with their rhetoric, that has poisoned faith and belief in democracy. That led up to an actual violent assault aimed to stop the counting of electoral votes that is now celebrated, and those insurrectionists are called political prisoners, including by some of the highest elected officials in the country, including a former president of the United States. So, the country’s in a lot of trouble. The reason the country’s in a lot of trouble is that we’re not looking clearly, and we can’t seem to understand that the Republican Party which existed in this state a year ago is even worse today.”
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