There is one man in the history of the U.S. who can show us how to navigate past the era of Donald Trump, according to a former Republican Party insider.
Political strategist Steve Schmidt, an independent political strategist who worked on former President George W. Bush's campaign, flagged a recent James Carville piece in which the legendary Democratic consultant argued that it "is abundantly clear even to me that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression."
Picking up the baton from Carville, Schmidt argued, "The party will either meet the moment — or meet the abyss."
"It will pass the test — or wither and die. It is time to stand and fight. The era of the Schumercrat is at its end, and it has been a disastrous denouement," he argued. "Appeasements, moral capitulations, cynicism and arrogance, combined with certainty, smugness and incompetence invariably lead to a disastrous harvest of rotten fruit, and here we are."
He continued, highlighting the one Democrat who he believes holds the answers to bypassing the president and his legacy.
"The hour requires conviction, judgement, wisdom and character. This moment requires reflection on the life of the most important leader in the history of the Democratic Party, and the only president who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Abraham Lincoln: Franklin Delano Roosevelt," according to Schmidt. "There is a way out of the Trump era, and more importantly, a path forward to better days, and perhaps even happy ones."
He added, "Franklin Roosevelt is a titanic figure, an American giant who saved free market capitalism, American democracy and the world from unfathomable tyranny. He was an architect of peace, as well as a generational visionary who had the wisdom to appreciate his vision could only endure for so long."
"Together, we are past the edge of that vision in a darkening world. It is made dimmer daily by an American Nero, a full-blooded fascist, a rotten fruit from the poisonous vines upon which FDR’s great enemies Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and the Ku Klux Klan sprang," the strategist wrote. "It is a vine steeped in the original sins of America’s deepest hypocrisies and contradictions that must be met head on in a coming season of reconstruction and American renewal."