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 Saturday, Schmidt reacted to a video clip from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on his Twitter feed over six posts, in which he blasts three Republican senators for their complicity with Donald Trump's regime. MaxNewsToday has assembled the tweets and reprinted them as one op-ed for our ongoing segment, Schmidt Storm. His tweetstorm has been edited for spelling, grammar and clarity. Joe Scarborough perfectly captures the magnitude of Trump’s deadly negligence and malfeasance.
He destroys Trump’s collaborators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Cory Gardner and annihilates the Wall Street Journal's editorial board for its moral cowardice and astounding treachery towards America.
I hope Vice President Biden watches this many times as he prepares to confront Trump and hold him accountable for the devastation of his failed leadership. Scarborough could not be more right about the harshness of history’s coming judgment. Trump’s conduct has been the greatest act of failure, negligence and malfeasance in the entire history of the United States. His judgment, malice, incompetence and ego have killed more than 100,000 Americans who should not have died of COVID-19.
He didn’t do it alone. Trumpism is built on a mountain of lies, lawlessness, vitriol, racism, division and corruption. Trump and his collaborators have assaulted the rule of law, America’s most important institutions, our alliances and basic decency. The moral cowardice of Republican leaders and the Trump media in this rancid moment is unforgivable. The damage they have done to this country is profound. It isn’t that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are moral cowards, though they are, it’s that they are among the greatest moral cowards in the history of the Republic.
What Trump did was an evil act. The aides, enablers, conspiracy theorists, propagandists and apologists who allowed it to happen are culpable and complicit in that evil. May God have mercy on them.
None of this had to be.