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 Friday afternoon, Schmidt delivered a three-minute, 40-second soliloquy on MSNBC in which he told anchor Brian Williams that the battle to defeat Trumpism is not over. MaxNewsToday has transcribed his comments and reprinted them as one easy-to-read op-ed for our ongoing segment, Schmidt Storm. It has been edited for grammar and clarity.
We have almost 48 percent of this country that’s voted for a statist authoritarian movement with fascist markers that’s hostile to American democracy, to the rule of law, that venerates an individual who is a cult of personality.
I think that Tucker Carlson is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024.
What you’re going to see is every Republican candidate will kowtow to the conspiracy that Donald Trump was stabbed in the back by unseen malicious forces of the deep state, that the election was stolen and that it’s illegitimate.
Forever, more than a majority of the Republican party will believe this was an illegitimate election, because they have been poisoned by the Murdoch operation, by OAN, by Sinclair and by the toxic sludge of sewage and crap and disinformation and lies that flows on Facebook onto the screens of the American people.
This is a long-term fight.
We have an emboldened white supremacist, white-nationalist movement in this country now because of Trump. We see a militia movement that has become part-and-parcel of the Republican party, where it’s now standard operating procedure at a political rally to see the guys with their AR-15s.
All of this needs to be sealed back under a sarcophagus of the type that lays over the Chernobyl reactor. But it’s going to take a long, long time to do it.
The good news is this. The majority of the country has rejected this. They’ve rejected it by more than four million votes. The state of Georgia will flip. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. This is a very substantial victory by Vice President Biden. It is an historic victory.
It is hard to turn a president out of office. Donald Trump has been repudiated by the righteous anger of the American people. Significantly.
Now, the Trump enablers like Lindsey Graham, they paid no price. They were rewarded for it. And now we see Lindsey Graham standing up with Donald Trump in what is tantamount, at least rhetorically, to a coup.
In the end, from Lexington and Concord forward, the idea of the country was that we -- and by ‘we,’ I mean the people -- govern ourselves. We pick the leaders. Our politicians don’t tell us how long they wish to serve. We tell them.
Trump has been fired because of his recklessness, his insanity, his malfeasance, his incompetence and because he’s the worst president in the history of the country who has presided over one of the greatest calamities in the history of the country. It’s time to pack up.
Every, single Republican elected official in this country, from dogcatcher to U.S. senator to governor, has an absolute moral and an American obligation to support the integrity of the election and the result of the winner.
And the winner is Joe Biden, the 46th president of the United States come Jan. 20, 2021 at the noon hour.