Never-Trumper and co-founder of the Lincoln Project Steve Schmidt has a plan to keep gun owners away from the polls this November: remind them of the recent comments made by Trump Administration officials like U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, FBI Director Kash Patel, and even President Trump himself that have drawn pushback from Second Amendment advocates and organizations.
Schmidt unveiled his plans during a conversation with former CNN anchor Jim Acosta, promising to highlight those remarks in a variety of settings between now and Election Day.
“I want to tell you what Save America is going to do about this,” said Schmidt, speaking with The Jim Acosta Show host Jim Acosta. “We're going to have ads around the NRA convention, and we're going to put these ads up on Fox and Newsmax and OAN. And what the ads are going to show is ‘Drunk Jeanine’ talking about taking your guns. And we'll have the Trump quote. And then I'm going to use Charlton Heston in it. Raising the rifle, talking about taking his gun ‘from my cold dead hands.”
Schmidt, who was a prominent Republican strategist known for his work with the Bush and John McCain campaigns, remained furious that on Monday, Jeanine Pirro — who is U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — threatened gun owners with jail time regardless of whether they were legally permitted to carry the weapon.
Yeah, I'm skeptical that Schmidt is truly "furious" over Pirro's comments, but then again, he seems to be a pretty angry guy in general. His Bluesky account rages against the "concentration camps" the Trump administration is supposedly setting up across the country, Trump's "proposed deformity and vandalism of the National Mall," the "lawless, fascist Trump regime," and... well, you get the picture.
On gun control specifically, Schmidt hosted Shannon Watts on his podcast "The Warning" a couple of years ago, and declared "the Second Amendment has a wholly different meaning today that's been politicized, propagandized, that's a total departure from what it was thought to be, meant to be, how it was treated by the overwhelming majority of Americans. Not a hundred years ago. Twenty years ago."
It sounds to me like Schmidt believes the Second Amendment doesn't protect an individual right to keep and bear arms at all, though he's an absolute moron and completely ignorant of history if he believes that attitude was common place 100 years ago, 20 years ago, or back in 1791 when the Second Amendment was ratified.
Ultimately, though, Schmidt's views on the right to keep and bear arms are irrelevant. What matters is his attempt to use the comments by Pirro, Kash Patel, and even Donald Trump himself to discourage gun owners from voting in the midterms.
“We're going to run that ad in the red states, and we're going to target gun owners. And we're going to call Donald Trump what he is, which is a gun grabber,” Schmidt told Acosta. “As a former Republican consultant, I have a PhD in how to use this issue effectively, and we're going to use it very effectively against Donald Trump in all of these districts.”
“If you're a Republican congressman out there in a district that Trump won by 10 or 12 points, know this: You are in danger. The tsunami's coming up over your roofline,” Schmidt added.
I don't know if Schmidt is aware of this, but there are already plenty of Republicans in Congress who've vocally pushed back against Pirro's statement as well as the opinion of President Trump and other administration officials that there's no way to peacefully protest while carrying a gun, or that carrying two magazines is evidence that someone's planning on acting violently.
Still, the fact that President Trump's sworn political enemies are planning on using these comments to drive down voter enthusiasm among gun owners shouldn't be ignored by the administration. Even if Schmidt wasn't going to be running ads, gun owners have a pretty long memory for stuff like this, and the administration really needs to be doing some serious damage control.
Actions speak louder than words, and it's incumbent that President Trump and his advisors recognize that there is a real danger here; not that some Second Amendment supporters will cross the line and vote for anti-2A Democrats, but they'll simply decide to stay home on Election Day.
The administration needs some signature achievements to point to between now and November. The work that the DOJ Civil Rights Division is doing under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon should be highlighted at every opportunity, but the administration should go even further.
As I wrote yesterday, I don't think that Republicans have the votes to pass HR 38 and create a national right to carry reciprocity law at the moment. There are, though several actions that President Trump himself can take. He could, for instance, direct Pirro to stop prosecuting individuals arrested for carrying a gun in the District so long as they can legally carry in their home state.
More broadly, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ could quit defending some of the federal gun control statutes that are currently being challenged in court; adopting the position that 18-to-20-year-olds are fully vested with their Second Amendment rights, for instance, and dropping its argument that the National Firearms Act imposes only a "modest" burden on the right to keep and bear arms.
What are some other actions the Trump administration could take to get gun owners enthused about voting in the midterms? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comment section... and hopefully someone at the White House will be paying attention to all our suggestions.
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