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 unleashed a scathing attack at House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has been quoted as saying that all Americans bear some responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol. MaxNewsToday has assembled this 7-tweet thread and reprinted it as one easy-to-read op-ed for our ongoing segment, Schmidt Storm. It has been edited for grammar and clarity. Kevin McCarthy’s conduct deserves more media scrutiny. Specifically, his meltdown and unbecoming panic. He told his members that it was “an easy vote” to embrace the Big Lie and assert the election was stolen. He told them it was an “easy vote” to nullify the vote and silence the voices of millions of Americans because of their skin color. He led them in establishing the new Jim Crow Caucus. He led a group of 140 all-white members in the cause of stripping millions of Black voters of their sacred franchise in the name of Donald Trump. He helped incite the mob, blamed it on Trump and now says it wasn’t Trump’s fault. Now he says we are all to blame. He is flailing. The corporate money is drying up. He is maneuvering and in trouble. The story that needs to be told is the one about his panicked leadership during the hours he was secured during the violent insurrection. His comportment was apparently like the sweating, overmatched, lying villains conjured from the minds of screenwriters trying to imagine political characters that possess the combinations of venality and cynicism that define the leader of the House’s GOP Minority. The rush chairman of the GOP caucus met a crisis of his own brewing and melted like a chocolate bar left on the hood of a car under the hot Bakersfield sun outside the sandwich shop he never owned or sold. The Capitol was ransacked, the Confederate battle flag breached the Rotunda, the American flag was pulled down and the MAGA flag was raised in its place. This is McCarthy’s doing, along with Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and others. It is the story of his weakness, indecisive dithering, panic, and a simpleton’s understanding of the chaos and death that flowed from his lying that needs to be told. I’m hearing more about it every day. It is shocking.
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