Steve Schmidt: MAGA People ‘Have Opted Out of Reality’

Lincoln Project founder Steve Schmidt said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” that MAGA people had “opted out of reality” regarding denial of the January 6 Capitol riot.

Melber said, “You have, of course, a schizophrenic defense of January 6. Bannon and these folks are saying it was fine, in essence. Then you’ve got other folks saying maybe it was bad, but it wasn’t caused by Trump MAGA people, which is a type of lie or propaganda that matters.”

Schmidt said, “Well, we have a large segment of the country that has opted out of reality, and the number is too high, and we have to deal with the problem and get as many of them back to the reality side of the line over time. But right now, a majority of the country is, in fact, not insane, and we watched it play out. We watched Trump incite it. We watched Trump lie about the results of the election. We watched Republicans after it condemn it before they forgot it and before they became complicit in the whitewashing.”

He continued, “What you saw was a fascist mob with extremist groups storm and murder in the Capitol of the United States, defecting in the hallways of the temples of democracy, urinating on the walls, carrying the Confederate flag through the Rotunda, ending the peaceful transition of power. We now know that there was a plan. There is a memo. There were meetings in the Oval Office around that memo for the president to deny the result of the freest and fairest election in American history and try to become a dictator. That is what happened. It couldn’t be more serious.”

Schmidt added, “So I think that two things, it’s, one, you can’t fix people who have opted out of reality. Two, we need to understand the causes of their opting out of reality, which is partly Trump’s lying, but also a vast propaganda network that imprisons them to some degree to follow this BS.”

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