Editor's Note: Steve Schmidt is one of the founding members of the Lincoln Project. He is a communications and public affairs strategist who has worked on several Republican campaigns, including John McCain's 2008 bid for the White House, and he is now a regular political contributor to MSNBC. On Saturday, Schmidt took to his Twitter feed to issue a warning about the danger to American democracy following this week's events, in which 126 House Republicans and 18 state attorneys general attempted to overturn the presidential election. MaxNewsToday has assembled this thread and reprinted it as one easy-to-read op-ed for our ongoing segment, Schmidt Storm. It has been edited for grammar and clarity. In all the years I worked in GOP politics, from local races to the White House, it never occurred to me that it was even remotely possible that there were people sitting in rooms with me that would one day be in favor of overturning a presidential election and make the loser America’s first dictator. I have warned about this danger for many years, yet I remain flabbergasted by this moment. We now know who has crossed the Rubicon. We cannot unlearn who those people are.
This is a photo of the American cemetery in Normandy. Each grave faces west, toward home. The home they never got to go back to. They died so we could live in freedom. They were mostly young men with their whole lives ahead of them. What would they say about this? Don’t let anyone tell you for a second that signing an Amicus brief is no big deal. It is a monumental event. It is a declaration of repudiation. A repudiation of American democracy and our birthright to pick our leaders. They are attempting to impose the fired president on the people who fired him. We have never seen anything like it, and that is disorienting. Yet, we do know what to call this. Don’t we? What would we call this in Germany or France? Trump has let the demons loose. We will be fighting them for decades. There is no certainty about what side will win. Should ours lose, let there be no lack of certainty about what will be lost. America will be lost, and all the assembled generations of Americans watching from heaven will weep. The light of American liberty will have been extinguished.