MSNBC analyst Steve Schmidt said Tuesday the difference now between the United States and the troubled nations of Venezuela and Cuba was that Venezuela and Cuba don't have "internment camps for babies and toddlers."
Schmidt, a former GOP strategist, officially left the Republican Party last week in disgust over the Trump administration's border policies enforcing separation of illegal immigrant parents from their children. On "Morning Joe," he blasted Trump officials who invoked "Christian virtue" to defend themselves.
"The extraordinary and astounding hypocrisy of it, to see the constancy of the assertion of Christian virtue by political leaders in this country who have established internment camps for babies and toddlers," Schmidt said. "By the way, and I never in a million years thought I would sit here or anywhere and say this, but the difference now between Venezuela and Cuba and the United States is this. Venezuela and Cuba are the countries without internment camps for babies and toddlers."
Venezuela is currently in extreme economic distress due to the socialist policies of authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro has cracked down on human rights as the country faces food and medical shortages owing to its current crisis. Cuba is a Communist country with a poor human rights record and a regime that imprisons political opponents.
Schmidt has spoken in no uncertain terms about his opposition to President Donald Trump, calling him a "stone-cold racist" and castigating his policies and supporters. Saying the GOP had given up control of the party to Trump's corruption, he told Rolling Stone the "party of Trump must be obliterated."
"If the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan is to be redeemed and resurrected, then the party of Trump must be obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed," he said. "And all of the collaborators, the complicit enablers, the school of cowards, need to go down. Maybe something can regenerate from that."