Steve Schmidt

“The country badly needs to have a right-of-center political party, grounded in traditional values that the Republican Party represented till it didn't.”

“We have 57 choices of ketchup and 500 TV channels. Very nearly everything has been disrupted in the country, from how we buy groceries to how we consume news, except for the system that produces the political leadership of the country.”

“There's never been an era absent of demagogues.”

“I don't want to sit here and disparage Paul Ryan the man, because he's a good guy. He's a moral person. He's a decent person.”

“One of the things that is for sure unique, we have never seen in this country a billion dollar propaganda industry in full service and in absolute control of an administration in the way that FOX News is.”

“Whether you're Democrat or Republican... you want everybody who's eligible to vote to vote, and that's how you want to win elections.”

“To see the Republican Party break up the way it has to lose its moral compass it is tragic, it's tragic for me personally, but I won't be part of it. I won't share a party label with people who think it's all right to put babies in internment camps.”

“I profoundly believe that the Democratic Party is the only vehicle we have to put a check on Donald Trump.”

“This is not Trumpistan.”

“For there to be new growth of a conservative movement, of a right center party, the one that I joined in 1988, it needs to burn to the ground.”

“I've certainly done more than my fair share of pouncing on a stupid issue to win the news cycle of the day, to distract from what are real and important issues.”

“Whether they're for good or bad, all trends in the United States start in California.”

“It's gratifying to work for somebody who doesn't measure accomplishment by the temporary state of public-opinion polls.”

“I think there are really serious problems in this country and I think politics in a lot of ways is failing the country.”

“Politicians have an acutely honed instinct for self-preservation.”

“As a conservative myself that, you know, generally I would have a point of view that less regulation is better than more regulation, but less regulation shouldn't supersede a tax on the fundamentally important institutions that sustain a democratic republic.”

“It's part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there's widespread voter fraud all across the country. In fact, there's not.”

“Politics always fascinated me. In my 20s, I was involved in politics and, as I look in the mirror, not for the noblest of purposes. It was for sport.”

“I think that more and more Americans are insistent that, at a minimum, gay couples should be treated with respect and when they see a political party trying to stigmatize a group of people who are hardworking, who play by the rules, who raise decent families, they're troubled by it.”

“I would find it difficult to be involved in an effort that I think disenfranchises people from a fundamental right. How do you work with people who are opposed to marriage equality? I don't want to do it.”