Ex-GOP operative names overlooked 'foremost threat to the stability of the republic'

Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt weighed in on what he sees as a major threat to the U.S.

Schmidt said on the latest episode of his program that, "47 percent of the country doesn't have $400 available for an emergency, and that is a foremost threat to the stability of the Republic."

He was commenting on Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and billionaire. Schmidt rebuffed Bezos' statements from a Friday interview arguing that working Americans pay too much in taxes. Schmidt called it performative coming from a billionaire "with a rocket in the background."

Schmidt compared Bezos' wife, Lauren Sanchez, to a "Marie Antoinette in the digital age" and said she's "200 percent happier than the normal person" right now.

"You can just see him sitting on the back of his $500 million boat with Lauren Sanchez discussing the plight of the nurse in Queens," Schmidt said. "What Bezos is okay with when he talks about the bottom half of the country by income distribution paying 3 percent of the taxes is basically a nation of serfs."

For Schmidt, the idea goes against the "economics that are part of our politics aspirationally" and the effort "to figure out how to rebuild the middle class of the country that used to include nurses," he said.

Americans' financial situations are hampering their ability to stand up to "the obscenity of what's going on in the country by way of corruption, by way of capitulation," but there's still "a deep anger in the public," Schmidt said.

"There's a lot of people, including some in the resistance movement, including on their podcasts, who have lamented why there's not 40 million people in the street, which I think is a very stupid lament," Schmidt said. "The answer to the question is because people are struggling to get by, and life is hard. And it's not 1967 anymore."