Quotes from Steve Schmidt

I think it's important to understand the history of the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854 because of the moral collapse of the Whig Party, specifically around the question of race and the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

One of the things I'm keen on doing is really revealing the degree to which the conservative movement, and by extension the Republican Party, has become a racket.

Liberal democracy is in regression all over the world, and it's a dangerous thing.

My role in Palin is something that there's not a day that has gone by that I don't have regret about.

The government is corrupted. It's corrupted. It is not about regular people.

I've spent my life in the Republican party, it gives me no pleasure to say this. This party has demonstrated a complete incapacity to govern. Period.

I do think there is every potential in 2010 and 2012 to begin to see independent candidates who are capturing a significant percentage of the vote and even win.

Politicians have an acutely honed instinct for self-preservation.

A mark of stupidity is a belief that one party is totally virtuous and correct on the issues while the other is evil and always wrong.

The country badly needs to have a right-of-center political party, grounded in traditional values that the Republican Party represented till it didn't.

To see the Republican Party break up the way it has to lose its moral compass it is tragic, it's tragic for me personally, but I won't be part of it. I won't share a party label with people who think it's all right to put babies in internment camps.

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.

Whether they're for good or bad, all trends in the United States start in California.

I think that more and more Americans are insistent that, at a minimum, gay couples should be treated with respect and when they see a political party trying to stigmatize a group of people who are hardworking, who play by the rules, who raise decent families, they're troubled by it.

Trump was legitimized by birtherism, and he was abetted by a billion-dollar incitement industry.

It's not just that there's no other spokesperson for the executive seat of power in a democratic republic anywhere in the world where you see that type of lying. It's that there's never been a spokesman for the executive seat in power who is such a prolific liar as Sarah Sanders.

Look, this CPAC convention is increasingly the Star Wars bar scene of the conservative movement. All that's missing from that convention is a couple of Wookies.

One of the things that is for sure unique, we have never seen in this country a billion dollar propaganda industry in full service and in absolute control of an administration in the way that FOX News is.

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.

Mitch McConnell has, as much as anyone, done great damage to the United States Senate as an institution that was once known as the world's greatest deliberative body.

Trump is what the Russians call a useful idiot, someone in service to the Russian Federation, either unwitting or wittingly.

A lot of people like me who worked in Republican politics had a personal set of beliefs on issues that were at variance with the candidates that we worked for.

I profoundly believe that the Democratic Party is the only vehicle we have to put a check on Donald Trump.

There's never been an era absent of demagogues.