RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
SCHMIDT: "Well, this convocation that we saw tonight, Brian, the coming together of the three coequal branchs of government, there is a veneer of normalcy to it all. The president went in there as presidents do and addresses the nation. But left unsaid was that this president comes in, the most unpopular president this early in his tenure in the history of polling. Somebody who has spent the last year leading a faction in this country, dividing the country. Somebody who is besieged by a criminal investigation, talking about the importance of our law enforcement organizations and institutions while at the same time the Republican majority working with the White House is engaged in a full-on assault trying to discredit the FBI, the Justice Department, doing everything they conceivably can to insulate the president from these investigations. We heard talk about expanding our nuclear weapons arsenal. There is not one serious student of American defense policy that thinks that this should be the chief goal of strengthening America's military. Across the depth and breadth of this, you saw a divisive speech, the wedge issue of immigration, the scare tactics of ms-13. There was no talk in this speech about the challenges the country faces over the next five years, ten years, 15 years. Where are we going as a country? So this divisive president came in tonight at probably the most divided this country has been in the last 50 years since that year of 1968. He did nothing to appeal to the better angels of our nature, as a country in this speech. And more than anything, there was a speech delivered almost from an alternate reality, a fifth dimension that presumes that nothing we heard from this president over the last year, nothing that we've seen actually in fact happened. And of course it did. And the American people know it. And so I think this is a speech that will not be long remembered. His words will float up like smoke from a fire and dissipate. In 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours from now, we'll see the typical recklessness, the looseness, the tweet out of left field that will extinguish this moment of supposed normalcy from our minds I suspect pretty quickly"