In any assessment of the top ten most vehement, most effective GOP political operatives who are critical of President Trump, Steve Schmidt would have to count among their number. As a regular contributor to MSNBC coverage of the Trump administration, he has been among the most adamant critics of the excessively orange dumpster fire that is this administration. We could roll the tape back to any major conflagration precipitated by the Trump White House and find a juicy Schmidt quote to go with it: impeachment over Ukraine; Trump-Russia; the family separation crisis on the border; the Charlottesville tiki-torch rally of white supremacists — any situation dating right back to the 2016 election itself.
Schmidt was sufficiently disgusted with the family separation crisis to have left the GOP in 2018, disavowing a party he had served for the entirety of his political career. More recently, he is a key voice in The Lincoln Project, a high-profile effort by disaffected Republicans (which is frequently celebrated on this site) to use their heft and aggressive, devastating ads to defeat Donald Trump come this November.
Just last night, appearing on Chris Hayes’ All In, Schmidt provided us with a searing indictment of the kind of magical thinking that presently inhabits the upper echelons of the GOP: what once was the preserve of the party’s bottom-feeder smear media — the stuff of late night rants on talk radio, only to be consumed by the party’s base, while blue-blood conservatives dutifully read the more judicious and cynical takes in the Weekly Standard or the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal — was now seen as gospel among the most high-ranking officials in the GOP and in the Trump administration. Here he is, prompted by Hayes to explain the kind of media consumption that has led Trump to self-medicate with a coronavirus treatment as hazardous and unproven as hydroxychloroquine:
And when you sit there, and you look at Alex Jones, and look at Laura Ingraham and judge Jenine, and all of them — I mean, each and every one is in their own right spectacularly nuts, as they go on and they talk about this stuff. And there are vulnerable people out there, watching these people make 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 million dollars a year, following their advice and endangering themselves, it’s just tragic, it’s such a lethal con and fraud that’s perpetrated by these people on the American people; there’s just not a word for it, it’s just despicable.
It’s really hard to find fault with any of this, taken on its own. And I appreciate Schmidt’s media appearances, given that he is so often a powerful and emphatic critic of the onslaught of Trump administration shenanigans.
But let’s take a second quick pass through the quote cited above from All In. Here he is, decrying the conspiracy thinking of folks like Alex Jones, Laura Ingraham, and all the rest of it, describing it as a “lethal con” that is being insidiously introduced into the daily media consumption of Trump’s faithful base nationwide — with implications that are not only harmful to them in terms of vague, long-term policy effects, but to their very personal safety and health.
But really, how did we get here?
The history of the Republican Party since about Goldwater has been a history of the ever more secure stranglehold that a certain kind of Know Nothingism — a willful detachment from science, data, empirically verifiable reality, grounded in ignorance and paranoia — has had on the soul of the GOP.
You start with Goldwater in 1964, his surprise victory in the nomination, and then his landslide defeat in a moment where it is clear that the extremist message of hardcore conservatives has not yet circulated beyond the party base. By the time you get to Reagan, you get a talented politician who is somehow able to reconcile, in his person, the extremist agenda of the party’s right flank with the affable, “aw-shucks,” low-key charm embraced by moderates and “Reagan Democrats” nationwide. In 1994, you get the firebrand Gingrich, successfully leading an overturning of the political order in which straining the truth has become a core strategic maneuver of Republican efforts.
By the Bush era of the early 2000s, you have someone who plays fast and loose with verifiable truth to an unprecedented extent, pushing his own respected Secretary of State to baldly lie before the U.N. about the ostensibly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein. That was the decade, too, that also saw the Terri Schiavo affair, in which the GOP was able to whip people up into a froth over medical and scientific misinformation for the benefit of their long-term political goals.
….But the real moment where we see a real sea change in the attitude of the GOP is in Sarah Palin’s ascendency to the Veep slot of John McCain’s campaign — a political maneuver that was engineered by Steve Schmidt to secure McCain’s flagging campaign performance in the 2008 general election.
Up until that point, the tendency was for GOP officeholders to say one thing in public and then to snicker up their sleeve about it in private, clinking glasses of single-malt with other cynical operatives as they lampooned the credulity of their mouthbreather base. You see this embodied in the person of Karl Rove, who was nothing if not utterly cynical in his political pursuit of a base for whom he had nothing but contempt behind closed doors.
With Sarah Palin, though, you get something very different: you get an incredibly myopic, ignorant, and credulous candidate who was up to her eyeballs in petty corruption (remember the lavish reappointment of the Wasilla town hall?), and unscrupulous about appealing to a coterie of “real Americans” who somehow never included coastal urbanites, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ community. Nate Silver cited a relevant quote here in a contemporaneous column:
Yesterday, at a fundraiser in Greensboro, North Carolina, Sarah Palin said the following:
We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.
Even Palin — not known for her subtlety — is somewhat circumspect here about who does not constitute a “real American”; that would fall to later, more explicitly xenophobic candidates like Trump to say. But you can see the groundwork for the present, nativist turn in the GOP being laid right here in late 2008.
Any of us who remember Woody Harrelson’s brilliant turn as Schmidt in Game Change, the HBO drama about the ascendency of Sarah Palin at the height of the 2008, understand the stakes of the choice that Steve Schmidt made in bringing her on board, the really Faustian bargain that was at stake: here was someone who appealed to the GOP base in a visceral, lizard-brain sort of way, who could inject a new energy into the campaign. And yet the price of that choice was to ultimately surrender the party’s commitment to competent leadership, to thoughtful policymaking, to a “big tent” vision of the GOP’s constituency, to inclusivity along lines of race, gender, sexuality, or nationality — and in the end, to any real connection to empirically verifiable reality.
We see the full implications of Palin’s Veep nomination in the dark turn that McCain’s party base took in the late stages of the campaign, their willingness to believe — as one woman famously said at a McCain rally — that Senator Barack Obama was “an Arab,” that he doesn’t think like ordinary Americans, that he had an agenda that was ultimately treasonous to the United States, in some vague, indefinable way.
The McCain campaign was still connected enough to reality, and to basic decency, to talk the woman down off the ledge:
“I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, um, he’s an Arab,” a woman said to McCain at a town hall meeting in Lakeville, Minnesota in October 2008.
McCain grabbed the microphone from her, cutting her off. “No, ma’am,” he said. “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that just I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab].”
But think of the long-term damage that was done here. Obama won that election in 2008, as anyone with a pulse will know. But a few months later, you would get the seemingly spontaneous emergence of the Tea Party: while nominally created as a means of critiquing the economic policies of the nascent administration, the real content of the Tea Party very quickly spilled over into race hatred, xenophobia, and nativism, much of it centered upon the same conspiratorial understanding of President Obama’s background that had circulated in the late 2008 campaign. It’s just two degrees of separation from Sarah Palin’s “real Americans” rhetoric of 2008 to the “Birthergate” conspiracy theory that essentially launched Donald Trump’s career a few years later.
So does Steve Schmidt accept responsibility for this? Adamantly, yes. He endorsed the HBO Palin biopic, despite some unflattering coverage of his own motivations, and in the runup to the 2012 election he would tell anyone who would listen that he felt Sarah Palin was “manifestly unprepared to take the oath of office.” Indeed, he engaged in a thoughtful mea culpa, a full acknowledgement of his own role in the emergence of a dangerous new set of political possibilities:
“For me and the experience I had on this campaign is that there are worse things than losing,” Schmidt said. When he was asked to spell that out, he said, “When a result happens that puts someone who’s not prepared to be president on the ticket, that’s a bad result. I think the notion of Sarah Palin being president of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly. And I played a part in that. And I played a part in that because we were fueled by ambition to win.”
My point here isn’t to skewer Steve Schmidt for water that is long since under the bridge, or to engage in some kind of whataboutism. Schmidt has been thoughtful in his self-criticism, and in a certain sense he has made up for it — at least in part — with his present efforts to push back against Trump in a variety of forums.
The point here is, rather, to document a crucial moment in the history of the GOP — one essentially encapsulated in the story that Chris Hayes covered last night. The GOP has moved, over the last decade and a half, from a party that was willing to leverage falsehoods it didn’t believe in to achieve political ends, to a party that came to believe those falsehoods as an article of faith — or at least to no longer be able to tell the difference. What facilitated those set of developments was a brutally ends-over-means logic that governed the strategic and political thinking of otherwise thoughtful operatives like Steve Schmidt.