Steve Schmidt: American Democracy Was Deliberately Poisoned

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Donald Trump’s impact on the Republican Party will be studied for decades to come. History will not only look at who joined the GOP in the Trump era, but also who left it. Steve Schmidt is one of them. For decades, a communications strategist working for President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain among others. Schmidt now denounces the party he once loved. He’s a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, the politically action committee formed in 2019 by group of Republicans to defeat Trump in this 2020 election. Here he is now talking to our Michel Martin about what’s next for the project, for the party and for preserving American democracy.

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Steve Schmidt, thank you so much for talking with us.

STEVE SCHMIDT, CO-FOUNDER, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: It is great to be with you. Thank you.

MARTIN: Politically party isn’t everything to most people. But to a politically consultant, to a politically strategist, it is. I mean, it’s your livelihood, it’s your identity, it’s your community, you know, in some cases, it is your family. So, I’m thinking that when you — the decision to leave a party for a political consultant or a strategist, seems like — that’s kind of like a divorce. I mean, it is traumatic. It is big. So, what was the point at which you said to yourself, I can’t do this anymore? I can’t be here anymore? Do you remember it?

SCHMIDT: After the McCain campaign, I warned as loudly, as vociferously as I could about this rising danger of the know-nothing movement in the party. The populism, the nationalism. I had my first public fight with Donald Trump in 2012 when Wolf Blitzer asked him to respond to comments I made about him and the racist birther nonsense that was coming out of his mouth. And so, by the time we get to the immoral act of the caging of the children, which is the final breaking straw for me, I left the party. But I’ve never viewed the party as having supremacy over the country. The party is a vehicle to advance policies and ideas in the great debate over the future of the country that’s been going on since the beginning. And so, I left with a clean conscience. It wasn’t a particularly hard decision for me. But I knew by that time that I just couldn’t be a member of a party that had descended into an autocratic cult of personality and had warped completely from anything that I could recognize in my service to it over my career.

MARTIN: So, was it — but was it a slow walk or was it kind of a fast sprint from that to the Lincoln Project? You know, was there sort of a moment when you said, it is not enough for us to just leave, we have to kind of proactively take a stand and start working to end this? How did that happen?

SCHMIDT: Well, Reed Galen, Rick Wilson, John Weaver and I started having these conversations in 2018. We just didn’t figure that we could launch this effectively in the late summer, early fall of 2018. But we always felt that there would need to be a political organization made up of vestibule Republicans to fight Trump and Trumpism. So, when we founded the organization before the election, what drove us most acutely was we watched the Democratic debates. And the name you never heard in the debates was Trump. In fact, you would see some Democratic candidate after the debate go on television and log the fact that it was a successful debate because, in fact, Donald Trump’s name wasn’t mentioned, and it terrified us. Because we had a point of view, and that point of view was this election was about Trump. The second issue in this election was Trump. And the next 300 issues after that, Trump. And that was before COVID. And so, we thought in our view of the campaign was there needed to be an institution out there, an organization that could frame the race and take the fight to Donald Trump.

MARTIN: And why do you see that? Talk a little bit more about that. Why do you say it was all about Trump?

SCHMIDT: We believe we have always seen him clearly. He is an autocratic leader. He is undemocratic. He has assaulted America’s most vital institutions relentlessly, not just as president but as a candidate. And I think that this month, this past month of November of 2020, we will look back at this as a historic month, not because Joe Biden was elected, though that is history. This was the month that American democracy was poisoned deliberately and intentionally. Democracy exists because of faith and belief in the eyes of the people about the legitimacy of the system and it requires the parties that compete against each other where it is in America’s federal system or a British parliamentary system, it requires the people who compete in that system to acknowledge sometimes you lose an election. And so, in one month’s time, every day, like a political Exxon Valdez, like a political Deepwater Horizon we watch the numbers rise. Day after day. More and more Republicans believing a fair and legitimate election was stolen. We saw the propaganda networks. We saw the conspiracy theorists and we watched that number rise. Now, we sit in a place where a president of the United States who’s been defeated is talking about doing a rally at noon on January 20th. In the whole history of the country, no one has ever questioned the American idea and ideal. The fight in the country has been about who gets to participate in it. We’ve never had a moment around the question of who’s in charge, the people or the leader, where so many people have now said, not the people, it is the leader. And it is really alarming.

MARTIN: So, I take it — well, I mean, that’s one thing that kind of explains my next question, which is the tone of your ads was really in your face. I mean, the tone of the Lincoln Project’s ads was very much in your face. Very much directed at Donald Trump. Is it because that’s kind of the language that you live in, that’s kind of your kind of natural — your first tongue anyway or is it because you really felt that you had to take the fight to him and make it about him?

SCHMIDT: We believe very strongly the pro-democracy side cannot be the gentle side in the debate. It needs to be a fierce debate. We had a psychological profile of Donald Trump. We had psychological profiles of Donald Trump’s team. We analyzed the organization. We understood the fissures in it. We knew where the factions were. And we did everything we could to antagonize him, to destabilize him, to make Donald Trump turn face and attack us as opposed to Joe Biden. We did everything we could to cause chaos within his organization. And we believe our messaging combined with our psychological profiles of him and the dynamics of his organization effectively allowed us to cut him. And we take some pride because I think that we’re one of the first groups that really hurt him over the last five years politically by turning and attacking him.

MARTIN: And this where sort of the next question is, what effect do you think you had? I mean, as I’m sure you know, there’s been a very lively debate about this over the last couple of weeks, I mean, since the election has been over. But by one survey, so maybe 8 million of Biden’s 81 million votes came from self-described conservatives and maybe 3 million from Republicans. So, that’s not, you know, small. On the other hand, you have the kind of progressive critique, you know, from the AOCs, Representative Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and sort of other progressives who say that, you know, the 60, 70 million that you spent is a lot of Benjamins for an outcome that isn’t as decisive as a lot of people would like, especially when you look down ballot and you saw that only two Republican senators lost their seats because they were also a target. So, how do you assess the effectiveness that you think you had?

SCHMIDT: Well, I’ll give you a couple of examples. We ran one ad that was called flag of treason. That was treatment of the confederate flag that was 20 years overdue in the country. We know from the leaders of (INAUDIBLE), the marine corps, the army and the navy, that that ad was instrumental in bringing down the confederate flag in those institutions, and it boxed Donald Trump into supporting the confederate flag in a way that had caused him a lot of difficulty with suburban white women and independent white males in the suburbs. And you can look at the demographics of the Georgia victory show a place where the impact of that worked. Look, when Donald Trump went to his Tulsa rally, he spent a half hour at that rally talking about how he was drinking water and about his walk down the West Point Ramp. And he spent the next month, as everybody remembers, taking the man, woman, TV camera dimension test. Every one of those things was in response to ads that we did. There’s two finite commodities in the campaigns. One is time. One is money. The coalition that elected Joe Biden is a large, broad and fragile coalition. What we all have in common is the belief in democracy, right, if not, in policy. We have in common is the idea that the American people should decide the future of the country. And so, the idea that there are progressive groups that are entitled to the money that we spent isn’t something that we really particularly understand. What we would say, we represent millions of people, right, who follow the Lincoln Project, the half million people who donated to the Lincoln Project, who played a role in delivering a victory to Joe Biden by turning out millions of people who in past elections have voted for Republicans. We both shaped the narrative of the national discussion. We also turned-out Republicans above what Steve Bannon called the Bannon line. It’s this idea that if you could peel off 4 percent of Republicans that it would be impossible for Donald Trump to win. If the coalition, and this is not the Obama coalition, this is not a progressive coalition that elected Joe Biden, it’s a different coalition, if it falls apart and you look at the structural advantages that Republicans have in presidential elections through the Electoral College, it means that you could wind up with President Tucker Carlson in 2024. Nobody should want to see is that.

MARTIN: I still want to understand your analysis of what happened in your party, your former party, in your view, that allowed Donald Trump to take over the party to make it his party? I mean, there have been a number of people not as well-known as yourself. I’m thinking about somebody like, you know, the conservative Wisconsin talk radio host, you know, Charlie Sykes, who was one of the first after the 2016 election to come out and say, you know, part of this is my fault because I ignored the fringe elements. I ignored the racism. I thought it was not important. I didn’t think it was a big deal and I’m part of the problem here. What part of this do you own? And how do you understand the fact that a Donald Trump has gotten to where he has?

SCHMIDT: Look, I always considered myself a (INAUDIBLE). I fought in the party to outreach the gay Americans, the black Americans, the Hispanic Americans. No one is going to find examples of racial demagoguery in my career. I’m the guy who wouldn’t allow the McCain campaign to run (INAUDIBLE) ads because they were racially toxic. The Republican Party became the party of Fox News. It became an entertainment party. It became a reality show, right. Year by year the freaks rose. The number of people who are out there as entertainers, not policy leaders, policy was stripped away from the party until it became at Fox (ph). Really what it is, it’s an organized conspiracy to maintain power for politically self-interest, and that is evidenced by the platform. You know, when the platform became in its final form in 2020 was essentially an oath of obedience and loyalty to Donald Trump, it shattered any ideas, any notion that the party stood for actual issues, ideas, public policies for the public good. And that’s a tragedy in a country that has a two-party system. What we have now, right, this has become, through omission or commission, and there is more than enough commission in it and a hell of a lot of omission. It has become America’s first autocratic party. Now, what I would also say this to my progressive friends, to think carefully about the condescension, about the (INAUDIBLE), about the indifference that lot of people fear in this country from those massiveness (ph). We have 40 percent of this country doesn’t have $400 cash available. That is destabilizing our democracy. FDR and there is a lot of analysts who will look back and say, well, his new deal programs didn’t particularly work economically. And they are probably right in the analysis. But they worked politically. And not from a vote share but in a macro sense because they sustained faith and belief in democracy, in the eyes of the people at a moment where all over the world in the 1930s fascism, extremism and nationalism was rising as the antidote to academic depression. Faith, hope and belief, right. And we’re going to be a pro-democracy organization both here domestically and globally, right, fighting this era of autocracy and democratic (INAUDIBLE).

MARTIN: So, what’s your goal now?

SCHMIDT: We will oppose Trumpism. We have a view of Trumpism. It is a rooted ideology, an autocratic ideology. The fascistic markers that’s comprised by an amalgam of extremist groups, conspiracy theorist groups, militia groups, white nationalist groups, nationalist groups, proto-fascist groups like the Proud Boys. We’ve seen dozens and dozens and dozens of members of Congress and U.S. senators refuse to acknowledge reality and acknowledge the results of a legitimate election poisoning American democracy. And so, we’re going to fight for American democracy as part of the coalition in defense of it.

MARTIN: How do you get people to care about that?

SCHMIDT: There is only two ways to win a fight. You can bring your opponent to submission or your opponent can bring you to exhaustion. Submission, think Germany and Japan in 1945. Exhaustion, think of the United States and Vietnam in 1975. We cannot become exhausted in this fight or we will lose the country and American democracy. We have to bring the forces that Trump has let loose to submission. What I would say to Congresswoman AOC, is we have to bury this together, all of us. The militia groups, the people who storm the Michigan capitol, right, the sentiment that it is OK to arrest and kidnap governors and try them in basements, the idea on Fox News that a kid who picked up his AR-15 and shot three people in Wisconsin looking for trouble as some sort of national hero. We need the forces that Trump has whipped up to recede, to shrink, and we have to beat them at the ballot box or we will lose the country. Trumpism wasn’t repudiated in one election. We’ve had America’s greatest conman in history. One of its greatest demagogues in history assume the power of presidency and he vandalized the country politically. It is polity. He works for self-interest. He poisoned the public good. He’s a consequential president. It will take us a long, long, long time to recover from this as a country, both in spirit, physically, from a disease, from a pandemic and from our animosity towards each other that he has stoked.

MARTIN: Steve Schmidt, thank you so much for talking with us today and I do hope we’ll talk again.

SCHMIDT: Thank you so much for having me.