Forces of autocracy threaten democracy in America by attempting to use force to disallow and reverse the outcome of a legitimate democratic election

Full text transcript here: 

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-wednesday-edition-1.5871385/january-13-2021-episode-transcript-1.5872935

 IMPEACHMENT: FORMER REPUBLICAN Guest: Steve Schmidt 

 CH: Donald Trump is now the only president in United States history to be impeached twice. This afternoon, the Democrat-led House of Representatives voted in favour of an article of impeachment that accused Mr. Trump of incitement of insurrection. The proceedings have revealed fractures in the president's party in his final days in office. Ten Republican representatives also voted in favour of impeachment, including the number three House Republican Liz Cheney. Steve Schmidt is one of the founders of the Lincoln Project and a longtime GOP strategist who left the party during the Trump presidency. 

 CO: Mr. Schmidt, no House Republicans voted in favour of impeachment last time. What does it say to you that there were 10 who support impeachment today?

 STEVE SCHMIDT: Well, it says that. The Republican Party has broken into two factions, an autocratic faction, which is the Trump faction which incited insurrection, incited violence at the United States capital, which fell last week to Trump's thugs. And it shows that there is a bipartisan consensus that wants accountability for the criminal president of the United States and the unfathomable, unprecedented breach of his oath of office.

 CO: A number of the speeches that people gave today, some of them clearly still support Mr. Trump and his rhetoric and his claims. But numbers of others said that they condemned him for what they did or criticised him, but they felt that this wasn't the way to go, that it was time to seek a higher ground, I think someone said to tone down the rhetoric. Should they be regarded differently amongst the Republicans?

 SS: They should not be regarded differently. And the offer they're making is extremely disingenuous. "Tone down the rhetoric" after four years of complicit silence, listening to Donald Trump stoke a cold civil war that culminated in violent desecration of the floor of the House of Representatives, the floor of the United States Senate, Confederate flags being carried through the Rotunda, the United States Capitol, the Citadel of freedom, the people's house? At the end of the day, what they offer is appeasement to all of us who believe in American democracy. What they offer is surrender to the autocratic movement that Trump has birthed in the United States. And at the end of the day, we saw last week seven United States senators and 147 members of Congress rise in the name of a conspiracy theory that was factually rejected on 60 different occasions in federal courts seeking to disenfranchise tens of millions of Black voters to install the loser of the presidential election as the winner, which would have brought about the downfall of the American republic in its 244th year of independence. 

 CO: Do you think that the Republicans who voted against impeachment today and those who were voting last week, do you think that they actually believe that -- they actually support him -- or are they afraid of him, afraid of his influence and power. But there are a sizable number, millions of people in your country, who support those people who were on Capitol Hill on last Wednesday. So why is that? 

 SS: Well, obviously, a majority of the country does not support American autocracy -- a majority of the country decisively voted for Joe Biden. But we have a problem in the country because the president of the United States has been faithless to American democracy. And we see this all over the world. Canada is not immune to this. We see this in Europe. We see Democratic rescission everywhere we look. It's a dangerous movement. So we're going to be in a fight in America for the next 25 or 30 years where the pro-democracy side can never again lose a national election to the autocracy side, or it will be the last election we ever have in America.

 CO: You said at the beginning that there was a split, a clear schism in the Republican Party, what we saw today. So what happens? Do you see the party does split apart? Is that the future?

 SS: Yeah. Look, the autocrat will not be able to sit next to the small-d Democrats inside the Republican conference. 147 people rose to throw out the results of an election that would have brought about the downfall of the country, that's not a reconcilable position. You have a conservative movement led by Liz Cheney and an autocratic faction led by Kevin McCarthy. And one of the things that you're seeing is this movement by corporate America to fundamentally defund the autocratic faction of the Republican Party by refusing to give contributions ever again to any candidate, to any member, to any committee controlled by any member who rose to strike down American democracy, who rose to disenfranchised millions of Black voters, who rose in defence of conspiracy theories, who lied to the country, embraced the big lie and incited insanity until it spilt over into violence in the capital of the United States