Steve Schmidt Condemns Trump for ‘Delusion’ and ‘Happy Talk’ During WH Pandemic Briefing: ‘Overmatched by Events from Beginning to End’

Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt raked President Donald Trump over the coals for his absurd, dismissive, and misleading performance at the White House coronavirus briefing.

Speaking with MSNBC’s Ari Melber, Schmidt, an MSNBC contributor and confirmed Never Trumper, slammed the president for the outlandish and false statements made at a Rose Garden briefing on Monday.

During the at-times confounding and combative press event, Trump bizarrely claimed that the country had “prevailed on testing,” even as his administration touts all its efforts to massively ramp up testing in order to meet demand in an effort to reopen the economy. And he also falsely claimed, again, that any American that wants a test can get one “right now.” Then, a bizarre sequence of events led up to the end of the event. First, Trump sniped at an Chinese-American CBS reporter, Weijia Jiang, and dismissively urged her to redirect her question about the U.S.’s highest-in-the-world death toll to the Chinese government. Jiang fired back a curt response, implying she was being singled out because of her ethnicity: ““Sir, why are you saying that to me, specifically, that I should ask China?” Then, when CNN’s Kaitlin Collins stepped up to ask Trump a question after he called on her, he abruptly ended the press conference and walked away from the podium.

Absorbing all this, Schmidt wasted no time stripping the bark off of Trump.

“He’s shown a terrible example to the country. One of the most important qualities of leadership in a moment of crisis like this is the ability to talk honestly, directly, clearly, so people understand what is the situation,” Schmidt said. “So right now, the country in many ways is opening back up, but it’s not opening back up because of coronavirus, Covid-19 is diminishing, because there’s less cases or there’s less deaths. It’s opening up because Donald Trump thinks it’s politically expedient for it to be opened back up, and to get the economy moving.”

“This didn’t have to happen. It didn’t have to be the case that we’ll lose by August, according to the model, 137,000 Americans. Most likely more. We didn’t have to have a shattered economy. We don’t see this in other places around the world,” Schmidt pointed out. “And we saw at his news conference today, on top of the overt racism at the CBS White House correspondent, we just saw more delusion, more happy talk, more fantasy, more dangerous fantasy, that in the end will get people in this country killed. And we’ve seen a president who just completely is overmatched by events from beginning to end.”

Calling out the “bullying,” “nastiness,” and “racism” he saw at Monday’s briefing, Schmidt emphasized this just confirmed Trump’s “manifest unfitness.”

“Our health care responders, first responders are underequipped,” Schmidt noted. “This has been a national disgrace. There has never been a moment in our lifetime, or in the last 75 years, where the United States has appeared more weak to the rest of the world than it does now. We look weak and pitiful. We look like a basket-case on the world stage with our dishonest, delusional, divisive president, who just is not equipped at a moral level, at mental level, at an intellectual level to lead the country through this. So we’re less than 200 days away from an election that is just profoundly important.”

“He demonstrated yet again today that he has zero capacity to lead this country out of this,” Schmidt added. “And it is delusional, BS happy talk in the extremis, when [Treasury Secretary] Steve Mnuchin or President Trump saying everything is going to be fine by the third and fourth quarter. And we’ll be booming next year. We’re going to see unemployment rates in the United States north of 20%, maybe as high as 30%. We’ll see all this societal pathologies that accompany that. We have millions of people who can’t feed their families. We’re facing an economic catastrophe in this country. The programs that were passed are not working for the people. The people who need the help.”

“At every conceivable level, the president has failed.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.