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 Wednesday night, Schmidt reacted on his Twitter feed to Florida's Sen. Marco Rubio's faux indignance at Joe Biden's campaign manager calling Republican lawmakers, "a bunch of fuckers." MaxNewsToday has assembled this 9-tweet 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.
I’m speaking to you in a low and steady voice right now, just the way anybody would talk to an insane person. Are you okay? Are you looking past the Senate and thinking of trying to beat out Zac Efron for the Bundy role in the next biopic? Are you trying to showcase sociopathy for the nation? Your hypocrisy is evidence of a delusional personality that sees virtue where everyone else sees cowardice and craven dishonesty. You are an American Vichy. You abandoned every principle you once claimed fidelity toward to stand as an apologist for the most malignant and incompetent president the nation has ever had. His lethal lying, and your complicit silence, have killed hundreds of thousands of people. He has poisoned the country with his idiocy, racial animus, conspiracy theories and lies. He has assaulted the rule of law, just as he has assaulted the Western Alliance that protects democracy. During the last weeks, he has strangled faith and belief in American democracy with his lies, conspiracies, insanity and your help. Tens of millions of Americans, to the delight of our enemies, have bought into your cancerous accusations assaulting the legitimacy of our elections process, which is the crown jewel of the American Constitutional Republic, the oldest in the world. Each morning, you have the nerve to tweet out Bible verses, while serving as a handmaid to Trump’s’ indecency, malevolence, bullying and cruelty. You are contemptible. Please take your crocodile tears somewhere else. One can’t help but wonder if the Lord looks down at your epic fraudulence and says, “Wow, unbelievable. I really overdid it with this one.” After four years of madness, corruption, death, lying and thousands of desecrations against our institutions, Lil Marco has finally roared, or perhaps squeaked, in righteous fury. His object, Jen O’Malley Dillon, for referring to, accurately, GOP Senators as Fuckers in Glamour magazine. As if. Marco is a victim, it seems. He feels violated and debased, apparently. It’s like his 2020 was ruined, all of a sudden. Let’s reject Marco’s bullshit, crocodile tears and faux outrage. Sometimes, in times like these, it helps to reach for a quote from the pages of history. The words of a President of the Senate, once uttered on the floor of that august chamber, seem appropriate for the moment, and especially for Lil Marco: “Go fuck yourself.”