Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt had a sharp message for outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday.
Schmidt, a co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, argued that Leavitt would leave behind a legacy that would someday haunt her children — and that she would have to face her role in President Donald Trump's regime.
"This is the face the whole world knew was lying," Schmidt said. "It is a face of degeneracy, an ugly, twisted face that spewed poison nobody ever thought possible that could ever leak from this White House or any White House."
Schmidt described how Leavitt had responded to the ICE killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, defended Trump's hand bruising, and attacked members of the press who pushed back on the administration.
"Bhopal-like death cloud poison, the type that chokes a democracy, that capsizes faith in institutions, in each other, in the basic conception of reality and the ability to tell it apart from the most malicious, horrific and fantastical lies," Schmidt said. "Karoline Leavitt, at a young age, helped obscure the ability of millions of Americans to know what is up and what is down, what is left and what is right. Over and over again, she had the opportunity to display character, to show dignity, to measure up. Instead, she fell down."
"All of the lies have come together now in a great stew of catastrophe for the American people," Schmidt said. "And it didn't just happen. It got there brick by brick, lie by lie. And Karoline Leavitt, of all of Trump's shills and liars, distinguished herself."
He called her lies "more rotten than the last, more putrid than can ever be imagined since the last was thought to be as rotten as it gets."
"But no, Karoline Leavitt is like a deep-sea diver who found a door at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that let her go lower. Good riddance," Schmidt said.
He had a warning.
"What comes next will likely be worse," he added.