Thursday on MSNBC’s “Live,” former John McCain presidential campaign chief strategist and political commentator for MSNBC Steve Schmidt said for “new growth of a conservative movement” the Republican Party of Donald Trump must “burn to the ground.”

On the current state of the Republican Party, Schmidt said, “That’s not to mention the baby internment camps, the indecency, the cruelty, the meanness, the lying, the complicit nature of this Republican majority with an attack on the country that’s launched by the Russian Federation. So the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It’s over. It doesn’t exist anymore. It has been taken over, lock, stock, and barrel. For there to be any redemption of a right of center conservative party in the United States of America means the party of Trump must be destroyed politically.”

He continued, “It’s like a fire. Fires are a part of the ecosystem, part of the natural progress. And when the forest burns, it’s purified. There can be new growth. 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.”

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