John McCain Strategist: Trump ‘Unleashed Vast Quantities of Human Suffering’ with Syria Move

Appearing Friday on MSNBC, Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, said President Donald Trump “unleashed vast quantities of human suffering” by withdrawing U.S. troops from northern Syria.

A partial transcript is as follows: 

CHRIS HAYES: There’s some talk about a bipartisan vote in the House condemning the Syria policy. There might be one in the Senate. There’s some line of argumentation that you can start to see Republican senators start to get freaked out about the very durability of the country’s interests being vouch-saved about the man in charge of it that might make them more open or more willing to break with Trump on other things. Do you think that is true?

 STEVE SCHMIDT: We haven’t seen it so far. This is the first instance. Because [of] the incompetence of the decision and the consequences of that decision, we have hundreds of ISIS fighters who have escaped from prison. They’re not going to go to community college. What they’re going to do is they’re going to kill people and they’ll kill people in western capitals. We see a foreign policy disaster really of unprecedented dimensions.

The consequences of that disaster will be felt for years. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know how any of this will play out, other than to say Trump has unleashed vast quantities of human suffering, he has destabilized the most destabilized region in the world, and he has harmed deeply the national security interests of this country.