Steve Schmidt: How Democrats Should Seize the Moment

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And protecting the planet has been a key issue also, of course, for the California governor, Gavin Newsom. And he has just handily beat back a recall challenge from Republicans who appoint him to his climate agenda amongst other things. Newsom has also staked his reputation on mask and vaccine mandates. And that’s in stark contrast to governors from states like Texas and Florida who have not. GOP strategist, Steve Schmidt, says their anti-science stand is a selfish ploy to woo the far right. Schmidt who resigned from the board of the Lincoln Project in February tells Michel Martin how Democrats should seize the day.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Steve Schmidt, thank you so much for joining us once again.

STEVE SCHIMDT, CO-FOUNDER, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: It’s good to be back with you.

MARTIN: So, I’m going to just start by asking you, how do you understand what’s going on right now? I mean, as we are speaking, a number of Republican governors are just furious about both mask mandates and vaccine mandates even though their states are among the most heavily affected. I mean, at one point, 1 out of 7 new infections were coming out — COVID-19 infections were coming out of Florida. At the same time the governor there is suing jurisdictions for imposing mask mandates. So, how do you understand what is going on in our politics right now?

SCHIMDT: I think the proper way to look at this is part of an ongoing series of events at a very momentous time, in a momentous season. And what we’re seeing is a homebrew of America radicalism, extremism, a type of nihilism. For sure. Ron DeSanctis of Harvard University understands completely the efficacy of these life-saving vaccines. But he has gambled. And his gamble is that it is expeditious for him to climb the ladder of power in the Republican Party, to position himself as an heir to Trump to be with regard to COVID, with regard to the mask mandates, to cater to an extreme and intense base, that he views will be determinant of in the next Republican primary process. Now, Saudi Arabia is a good example how to thing about this. You have the king. The king is Trump. My view is that Trump will certainly be the Republican nominee in 2024. But he won’t be around forever. So, when you look at Abbot in Texas, when you look at DeSanctis in Florida, when you look at Noem in South Dakota, when you look at others, what you see now is a battle amongst the crowned princes and princesses for control of the Maga (ph) Empire. And the things that they are doing to get to the top very sadly demonstrate a profound callousness towards life, towards any sense of public responsibility. And it all accumulates into what we’re seeing right now, literally in the history of the country. You have never seen people, no matter how corrupt they are, charged with actual life and death responsibility advocate that responsibility for their selfish political interests. And so, we’re in this bidding war right now the see how extreme it can get to gain favor in this era of negative partisanship where the louder the outrage is from the majority, from the majority of normal people such as it is in this country, the more fuel they will have to advance their political rise inside of Maga (ph).

MARTIN: I want to hear a little more about the Saudi Arabia analogy. Like why do you say that? Is it because you are saying sort of educated — just because people are educated elites doesn’t mean that they have is same world view and same sense of what the purpose of the nation is? Like tell a little bit more about why that is the analogy you draw on.

SCHIMDT: I think it is important that we stop pretending. That we stop pretending that men like Kevin McCarthy, Ron DeSanctis, Greg Abbot don’t understand the efficacy of vaccines, don’t understand basic American history, that they don’t understand the lawful authority of government at a federal level, at a state level, at a county level to enforce quarantines if necessary for the purposes of the public health. For the public good. This is as old as the country itself. The exercise of this type of lawful authority. So, let’s stop pretending that any of these people think it is a good idea to take horse dewormer or that it is OK to inject some type of household disinfectant. They all know this is insanity. Every one of them knows for sure there wasn’t election fraud. They know that Joe Biden won the election. Yet, every time they speak and they lie about these things, we’re all supposed to pretend that they are making these statements as part of a conviction or some level of good faith, and the evidence contrary to that is their own spoken words over the course of many years. So, let’s stop pretending. What we have in this country is an extremist movement that’s autocratic, that is rejecting central pillars of American democracy. It is ascendant. It is on the march. It is both more extreme, more powerful and more prepared for victory in September of ’21 than this was in January of ’21 when the insurrection took place in the first place.

MARTIN: Tom Ridge, another former governor, Pennsylvania, former head of the Department of Homeland Security, called this the Taliban wing of the Republican Party. And so, the question is, why? Why did that take over so quickly? I think you dispute this. But I’m sort of arguing, is it that identity politics was always more important to the party than perhaps people were willing to admit, and by that, I mean, white identity politics or is it something else? Is it some sort of continuum of things? What do you say? What do you think it is?

SCHIMDT: At each instance of black progress, or even maybe more devastatingly, when there was hope for black progress in the 1870s until reconstruction ended and it was snuffed out. There is a profound whitelash, a backlash, to that black progress. I believed, largely, for a lot of my adult life, that the civil rights movement was largely over. And it had been achieved with the election of a black president. I had a profound naivety. And I’m not alone in this, about the backlash that came for our having a black president in this country. And we’ve seen that manifested over these years from a whisper and maybe people less naive for me were able to hear it better and it wasn’t such a whisper to them, or even a signal at all. But now, what we see is loud overt, clear as day, hundreds of pieces of legislation that are set to break what I thought was an understanding that we all had in this country, whether you were Republican or Democrat, which is that we all get a say regardless of our creed, our race, our gender, our sexual orientation. This is what’s been shattered here. This is what Trump has broken. And so, now, for the purposes of power, you see people claiming that freedom requires that some of us don’t get to participate. This is always the argument that right wing authoritarians make.

MARTIN: So, we talked about the sort of the DNA of the Republican Party and how it has evolved in recent years. What about the Democrats? What would you see is the DNA of the Democratic Party right now?

SCHIMDT: Well, the Democratic Party is the majority, but it is a fragile coalition. And I think it is really important to understand that coalition which extends from Republicans who’ve only cast a couple of votes, who are a small part of it but determinative in victory all the way to AOC. And what that coalition has in common is a belief in democracy, in the dignity of the human being above the power of the state. That coalition put Nancy Pelosi in the speaker’s chair in 2018. It fell apart by 2020. It did not hold together below Joe Biden thought it came back briefly together for the two Senate races in Georgia. And now, this coalition is being tested and it will be tested by the type of attacks that Donald Trump is making, that are race-based, full of animus, that are essentially this, to those white Republicans, those independent voters, Republican men, Republican women, what they are saying is, you may not like Trump. But these people over here, the ones that are trying to indoctrinate your kids with critical race theory, they hate you. They want to teach your kids to hate you. They want to take your possessions. They are waging a culture war, right, and they are inciting a passionate minority. The Democratic Party, and we’ll get a good look at this in California. I think is not as intense, not as focused as the Republicans are at taking power right now. It is the more docile of the parties. It is not fierce enough. It has not done a good job of holding the extremism back over the last nine months. So, this coalition, while larger, is more vulnerable, more diverse, more diffuse, more disagreeable than the cult of personality that it’s facing.

MARTIN: A number of columnists have sort of said in recent days that, you know, Democrats seem worried about offending Republicans and Republicans want to win. And so, how do you understand their sort of reluctance to, for example, take steps that, what, forestall these restrictions on voter access, for example? There — really, at this point, there is only one way to do it. And that is through federal legislation. So, how do you understand the Democrat’s reluctance to address these issues?

SCHIMDT: I don’t understand it. This was inevitable. It was predictable. And there is no issue that should make Democrats or any person who loves democracy more furious than this. In response to the lie about the stolen election, there was an actual vote that took place where 147 Republicans voted to nullify, disenfranchise the votes of millions of black Americans on the basis of BS. What followed next was the first filings of legislation, the intent of every piece of legislation is maliced. That’s because none of it would have ever been filed if Donald Trump hadn’t won the election. And every piece is designed to make it more difficult for minorities to vote. But most importantly, to make it more difficult to certify elections when one side factlessly claims fraud. And so, this was coming. And the only way to stop it was the repeal of the filibuster. And from the very beginning, the repeal of the filibuster should have been framed by Democratic leaders as a moral necessity in an act of last resort should Republicans dare try to unravel the civil rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 and pull this country back. And so, across the broad front of an unrelenting series of events, the Democratic Party, as a whole, has done a horrendous job confronting the growing extremism in this country and framing for the American people the terrible place where it all leads. And filibuster is part of that.

MARTIN: But I’m asking you why. I mean, you know these people. Why do you think that is?

SCHIMDT: I’m not a psychologist. What I can tell you about politics is this. Is restraint in the exercise of power is an underappreciated virtue. But the exercise of power at necessary times and times bluntly is a prerequisite for effective leadership. Democrats have the majority. They should pass Roe v. Wade statutorily. They should act with all the power they have to bring this pandemic to an end by increasing liability for companies that won’t act responsibly. Democrats will soon be asking their donors for hundreds of millions of dollars. They will be asking to elect candidates. They must be able to explain to what end. And if the Democratic Party and its most important loyal constituency, black Americans, cannot count on the leadership of the party to be all in as a moral proposition to defend voting and civil rights, 150 years on, five years before the 250th anniversary of this country, the voters will be disappointed at a level that is beyond my ability to articulate and it will have the effect in the end of propelling a fascist movement back into congressional power in my view in this country.

MARTIN: I know you have been asked this before, but, you know, the Lincoln Project tweeted earlier this year that said, our mission is clear, destroy the Republican Party. But I know you have been asked a lot about some of the tactics. And I have to ask some of this again, is just this kind of this fight fire with fire approach, part of your message to folks is that you are getting screwed and these are the people doing the screwing. But the former president’s message is, to the people that he cared about was, you are getting screwed and I’m going to fix it. If everybody’s message is, you are getting screwed and I’m going to fix it, where do we go from here as a country?

SCHIMDT: I think the country is in a lot of trouble. And I want to speak to what I’ll call the both siderisms that I think is inherent in the frame of the question. In fact, critical race theory isn’t being taught to kids in high schools in America. One political party is not lying about a life- saving vaccine. One political party is not partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of dead Americans because of those lies. One political party hasn’t whitewashed the insurrection on 1/6. And one political party is not a danger to American democracy. And there is not a symmetry between the two sides. The rottenness. And frankly, the evil. And we don’t use that word enough. But I need to linger here for a second. There was a meeting that took place in the White House that Jared Kushner chaired. I’m sure with coffee and doughnuts and all the good stuff. And they decided in that meeting that there wouldn’t be a COVID strategy for the blue states because they could pin it on the blue state governors. It’s evil. It kills hundreds of thousands of people in this country. We’re about to enter into the children’s pandemic. So, anything that we can do, grab people by the proverbial collar, by the neck, hit them in the head, get their attention, make them laugh, make them cry, make them think, anything, to get them to wake up and understand the danger that we face in this country from extremists and in the fight for American democracy, exhaustion is our enemy. The idea that there is not a difference between the two sides. Everybody is equally corrupt. Everyone is equally maliced. And it is just not true.

MARTIN: Steve Schmidt, thank you so much for talking with us.

SCHIMDT: Thank you.