'Deranged, addled and depraved': Steve Schmidt torches Donald Trump's 'great national gaslighting'

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, former Republican Party campaign advisor Steve Schmidt backed President Joe Biden's contention that Donald Trump and his "MAGA Republicans" are dangerous to democracy and then warned that the former president's "rhetoric is becoming more overtly extreme."

Reacting to both Biden's speech and the over-the-top reactions from conservative commentators and far-right GOP politicians, Schmidt made the case that the current president was extending an olive branch to mainstream Republicans and imploring them to reject Trumpism.

In his first tweet he wrote, "President Biden has offered a compromise to tens of millions of Republican voters who don’t want to abandon democracy. He has said let’s work together and destroy the MAGA movement. That is the compromise. It is necessary. It must be crushed to save America."

He continued, "Trump’s rhetoric is becoming more overtly extreme and is filled with promises of violence and revenge. He means every word. The Political coverage is filled with stories about fascists like @JDVance1 and @bgmasters trying to soften their anti woman extremism in time for Nov," before adding, "The American people must end this madness. The American people must rise up against the coward politicians who have gone off the rails and vandalized the American Republic to sate Trump and protect themselves from his ire. The fall campaign is underway and the choice is here."

As for the former president, he wrote, "Donald Trump is deranged, addled and depraved. He is unfit, disgraced and incompetent. He leads a minority faction that is beyond belligerent. They are teeming with menace. Enough. What they stand for is the worst cause since the last stand of Jim Crow and the Confederacy."

"The lies about the election results by MAGA extremists and Trump parrots have poisoned faith and belief in AmerIcan democracy and convinced millions of susceptible suckers that they live in an occupied dystopia that is plotting against them in a massive conspiracy that only Trump and his loyal team of patriots can stop," he explained. "It leaves the overwhelming majority slack jawed while the Trump minority led by some of the worst politicians in our history stoke the most feeble among them with crude masturbatory fantasies about Civil War, race war, religious war, the end times and a thousand other permutations of apocalyptic idiocy. Around all of the teeming madness is a level of grift and corruption that beggars belief."

He concluded, "The great national gaslighting rolls along for now. Time to stop it cold."