Donald Trump, the Worst American™, is the GOP nominee, so we all probably owe an apology to Sarah Palin for disqualifying her from sitting a heartbeat from the Oval Office because she was ill-prepared, ignorant, fact-challenged, mean-spirited and generally unfit. Why did we focus on such mundane matters?

Steve Schmidt, who chose Sarah Palin for the GOP VP slot in 2008 and then chose to not vote for her, is interviewed by Andrew Prokop of Vox about the sewer-water campaign of the hideous hotelier and what is likely to occur in the aftermath of a Trump flameout on Election Day. The political adviser sees the finger-pointing, paranoia and bigotry perhaps birthing an alt-right cable channel and a UKIP-ish factional movement. Whatever happens, it will likely involve further fracturing America.

The opening exchange:

Andrew Prokop:

Stepping back a bit from the swirl of allegations about Trump’s personal behavior in the news, what’s your big-picture view of the state of the Republican Party right now, and our politics in general?

Steve Schmidt:

One of John McCain’s famous quotes was quoting Chairman Mao: “It’s always darkest before it’s completely black.”

The Trump campaign is over — Hillary Clinton is going to be elected president. The question that remains here, the open question, is the degree of the collateral damage, right? The Republicans are going to lose the US Senate. The question is how many seats can they lose in the House. It is possible but not probable yet that they lose the House majority. So the question is, how far below 40 percent is Trump in the popular vote?
 
Then there’s a long-term implication for the civic life of the country, the vandalism being done, which will culminate for the first time in American history with his refusal to make an ordinary concession where he grants to the winner legitimacy by recognizing the legitimacy of the election. I think it’s very clear he’s going to go out saying it’s a rigged system.

I think what you’re gonna see is Steve Bannon monetizing 30 percent of the electorate into a UKIP-style movement and a billion-dollar media business.

And I think the Republican Party has an outstanding chance of fracturing. There will be the alt-right party; then there will be a center-right conservative party that has an opportunity to reach out, repair damage, and rebuild the brand over time. America, ideologically right now, is a centrist country — it used to be a center-right country — but it’s by no means a Bernie Sanders country. Not even close. The market will demand a center-right party.

The last implication for it behaviorally is it exposes at such a massive scale and at such magnitude the hypocrisy of the Tony Perkinses and the Jerry Falwell Jrs. and the Pat Robertsons. These people are literally the modern-day Pharisees, they are the money changers in the temple, and they will forever be destroyed from a credibility perspective.

There are millions of decent, faithful, committed evangelicals in this country who have every right to participate in the political process. But this country doesn’t ever need to hear a lecture from any one of these people [Perkins, Falwell, etc.] again on a values issue, or their denigration of good and decent gay people in this country.•