Steve Schmidt on Travel Ban Ruling: Trump is Responsible For the ‘Fulfillment of Osama bin Laden’s Vision’

MSNBC’s Steve Schmidt––who recently left the Republican party––decried the Supreme Court decision upholding President Trump‘s travel ban.

Nicolle Wallace talked with her panel about the SCOTUS decision, looking back at how we got from the originally-proposed Muslim ban to here.

She said, “I remember people in the intelligence community saying to me, ‘Who do you think we rely on the most in the countries that could represent the greatest geopolitical threats from us?'”

Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi said that today “we became a little bit less of that shining city on a hill” into a country that’s now “closed to people not like us.”

“You cannot separate the policy that’s been carried out at the border,” Wallace added, “from the President’s celebration from what Steve Bannon described… as ‘travel ban vindication.'”

Schmidt said that “today was a fantastic fulfillment of Osama bin Laden‘s vision by Donald J. Trump.”

He elaborated:

“What Osama bin Laden hoped to provoke was a war of civilization. A war between the West and one billion Muslims. And so what Donald Trump and this Muslim ban signal to the world is that Muslims are not welcome here, that this is––whether the conservative justices say in fact this is about executive power––the President’s clear intent was to impose a religious test, and that is as fundamentally un-American as anything that he’s done over the course of this presidency.”

He said moderate Islam is a key force in helping defeat “extremist Islamic radicalism” and today was a step in the wrong direction on that.

Watch above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

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