The Power Trip Olivia Nuzzi: STEVE SCHMIDT'S LONELY WAR

The political operative is spilling tea on all his perceived enemies. He swears he’s never been happier.

- 

THE REVELATION ARRIVED on horseback. One morning this winter while staying at the Ritz-Carlton, Dove Mountain, just north of Tucson, Arizona, Steve Schmidt was out riding. As he made his way along the desert path, he recalled later, his mind wandered and relaxed as he had experienced before only through meditation.

Schmidt started meditating after the successive health scares (a brain tumor followed by a fall from a different horse that resulted in a broken back, he said) that led him to get Cali sober, trade red meat for salads, start exercising, and lose 50 pounds. Yet the more that he solved every problem he perceived to be within his control, the more it became obvious that mindfulness and wellness could not cure what he had identified as the biggest source of his unhappiness. He believed that he had enemies, and he believed that they were winning.

He had been “a celebrity” and “a famous person” since he went to work for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, he said. That came after working on George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign and in the White House, where Schmidt managed the Supreme Court nominations of Samuel Alito and John Roberts before heading west to salvage Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bid for reelection as governor of California. Of the ways that status had changed his life, he fixated not on the opportunities and wealth that put the son of a schoolteacher and phone-company lineman from North Plainfield, New Jersey, on cable news frequently and made him buddies with Woody Harrelson (who played him in the HBO adaptation of Game Change) and parked a ’65 Corvette Stingray in the driveway of his 7,500-square-foot home but on every hater in his mentions and every hater in the press and the hater he hated most of all: Meghan McCain.