Hi, I'm Annamarie Cox. Welcome to With Friends Like These. Our guests this week are probably

familiar to a good portion of our audience, as erstwhile Republicans turned professional

Trump critics. Rick Wilson is of course a friend of the pod and frequent guest on the show.

He's the author of two bestselling books, Everything Trump Touches Dies, and Running Against the

Devil, which is also about Trump. Steve Schmidt is a former GOP strategist that I first got to know

on John McCain's straight talk Express, where his shaved head and ahead of its time,

Bluetooth earbud earned him the name, Lobat. Google it. You will enjoy.

We talked at the end of August as part of the Texas Tribune Festival's virtual panel series,

mostly about their Lincoln Project venture, a buzzy, often viral anti-Trump campaign that has

many fans among folks like us, and hopefully we'll reach some swing voters too. Coming right up.

So we only have a short amount of time, so I'm going to dive right in. I am personally curious,

especially for you, Steve, since we haven't been as in touch as Rick and I have been.

Was there a specific breaking point for you and Trump, when you were like, I have to do something,

or was it more just an evolution? Well, I've always stood in opposition to this from the moment he

came down the escalator, and I've been increasingly worried over the course of the campaign in 16,

his actions as president. I left the party over a specific incident, and that was the child's

separation policies on the border. I just thought it was profoundly immoral, his racial

demagoguery, his turning these people into an invading panther division about to bust through the

southern border of the country and the fever swamps of the Fox.

News imagination was just too much, and it just harkened back to the worst excesses in the

history of the country, the separation of families, at the slave auction blocks, and worst

abuses on the reservation at the end of the 19th century with child separation policies.

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