When President Trump wins re-election in 2020, it’ll be due in no small part to the fact that his critics sound crazier than he is.
From MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace wondering whether the Trump women can still feel emotion to the New Yorker’s Jeffery Toobin suggesting the president’s recent pardons and commutations are part of a bigger plot to antagonize African-Americans, it’s as if there’s a contest in news media to see who can come up with the most fantastically absurd commentary that, when put in perspective, makes the president appear calm and even-keeled.
The most recent example of this sort of insane punditry comes this week from MSNBC contributor Steve Schmidt, who claims the Trump administration’s vigorous enforcement of immigration policy makes the U.S. worse off than Venezuela and Cuba.
As soon as Trump starts arming biker gangs to ride around and attack opposition protesters, we’ll almost be in the same ballpark. Otherwise, the remark is truly insane.
Schmidt’s nutty commentary comes not long after he announced he is no longer a member of the Republican Party, explaining last week that he found the administration’s practice of separating illegal immigrant families particular odious.
This week on “Morning Joe,” he continued attacking the now-reversed separation policy, saying, “The extraordinary and astounding hypocrisy of it, to see the constancy of the assertion of Christian virtue by political leaders in this country who have established internment camps for babies and toddlers.”
He added, “By the way, and I never in a million years thought I would sit here or anywhere and say this, but the difference now between Venezuela and Cuba and the U.S. is this. Venezuela and Cuba are the countries without internment camps for babies and toddlers.”
Honestly, the most interesting thing here isn’t that Schmidt placed the U.S. below Venezuela and Cuba, two countries where human rights go to die. His commentary, which is really too stupid to deserve a response, is simply more of the same white-knuckling, hyper-partisan rhetoric embraced by much of the commentariat post-2016.
The most interesting thing here is that Schmidt has jeopardized his meal ticket by renouncing his GOP membership. Prior to his exit from the party, he was on a “well-trod path” for political converts and washouts.
“Years after he had morphed into a standard-issue right-winger, Georgia senator Zell Miller remained a Democrat. That ensured just about everything he said was newsworthy: ‘Democratic senator endorses George W. Bush’ is a much more interesting headline than ‘Republican supports Republican,’” the Weekly Standard‘s Ethan Epstein wrote recently about another GOP-operative-turned-cable-news-darling.
He added, “Bruce Bartlett, a fierce and often profane critic of the GOP, is a ‘former Reagan official,’ and he’s been dining out on that credential for decades.”
So, too, has Schmidt been dining out on his “Republican strategist” credentials all these years, presenting himself to cable news audiences as a savvy GOP insider despite that he hasn’t been attached to a campaign since around the time iPhones were first released.
But now that Schmidt has renounced his party entirely, it seems all he’ll have left going forward are his glory day anecdotes (like when he tried to put Sarah Palin in the White House) and performative acts of resistance. Basically, the exact same thing he has been doing for the last 10 years, but with a less flashy title.
