Thursday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” campaign strategist for former President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) Steve Schmidt said in light of The New York Times anonymous op-ed written by a senior White House official claiming that cabinet officials contemplated removing President Donald Trump under the 25th Amendment, we are in an “emergency.”

Schmidt said, “The emergency in the country is a psychologically unfit president. But the crisis is a crisis of cowardice—cowardice in the elected political class. People just don’t get it. Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., the son of a president, one-star general, demanded he be the first man off the landing craft on Utah Beach to lead the men ashore. Who will defend the republic? Every one of these people took an oath of office, not to their careers, not to their ambitions, but to the Constitution of the United States, to the republic. Everybody knows, all the political elected class, you saw Durbin do it, you saw Corker do it, everybody — you saw Sasse do it. It’s a bipartisan problem. They’re not America’s parents. The American people have a right to know. They have a responsibility to talk openly and honestly about what they know, what they’re seeing, and about the danger of it. This election is a referendum on Trumpism. It is a fundamentally—it is the most important midterm election this nation has ever had because if this is validated, we’re going to be living in a different America and it is going to be difficult to recover from it.”

He added, “And there is danger when someone is mentally ill and mentally unfit, and they command an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons. If you had an unfit commander of a ballistic missile submarine in the United States Navy, they would haul him out of it in a straight jacket. Even though there are two keys, one by the executive officer and one by the captain to launch the missiles, but the guy who commands all of the nuclear weapons, nobody, no senator, no governor, no congressman seems willing to say to the American people the nature of the crisis. It’s wrong. They are not doing their duty.”

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