Appearing on MSNBC on Thursday, former Republican political consultant Steve Schmidt, one of McCain’s key advisers in 2012, called for the total destruction of his old political party:
The Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It’s over. It doesn’t exist anymore. It has been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel. For there to be any redemption of a right-of-center conservative party in the United States of America means the party of Trump must be destroyed politically.
It’s like a fire. Fires are a part of the ecosystem, part of the natural progress. And when the forest burns, it’s purified. There can be new growth. For there to be new growth of a conservative movement, of a right-center party, the one that I joined in 1988, it needs to burn to the ground.
In other words, Schmidt is calling for a purgative defeat of the Republican party. Knowing full well that this will give the Left vast leeway to shape public policy, he is calling for the destruction of the GOP so that, in its place, an anti-Trump conservative coalition can be reformed.
Schmidt is not the only one espousing views such as this. When I criticized Schmidt’s position on Twitter over the weekend, Tom Nichols — a professor at the Naval War College, author of The Death of Expertise, and prominent Never Trumper who urged Republicans to vote for Hillary in 2016 — argued that “this GOP needs to lose its majority for at least a few years” (emphasis is his). Nichols maintained this view even when National Review contributor Liam Donovan pointed out that Democrats would probably do away with the filibuster if they took back the majority, eliminating the ability of a Republican minority to defeat liberal measures. Varhad Mehta joined the Twitter debate, asking, “You OK with the ACLU suing Catholic hospitals out of business because they don’t perform abortions? Because that’s what will happen if the Democrats get ahold of the judiciary.” Nichols replied, “I’ll chance it.”
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04.28.2025