Speaker 1: Welcome to another edition of the Schmidt Storm. You have questions,
Speaker 1: I got answers. Let's get going. The question is why
Speaker 1: won't jd Vance and Donald Trump stop with the lies
Speaker 1: about Springfield because it's been proven false. That's the point.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump has been reported to have kept books of
Speaker 1: Adolf Hitler's speeches on the side of his desk and
Speaker 1: had a long fascination with the German Nazi furor. And
Speaker 1: this all came from his ex wife. One of the
Speaker 1: things that Trump has learned from fascist history is the
Speaker 1: power of the lie, and a lot of MAGA officials
Speaker 1: have talked about the fact that the bigger the lie,
Speaker 1: the more believable it is. Hitler was the first person
Speaker 1: to talk about that. Goebbels has talked about that. So
Speaker 1: the lie, no matter how untrue, the crazier it is
Speaker 1: by some physics involved in lying makes it more believable. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to explain the political strategy. I'm sure you're
Speaker 1: familiar with the game of tug of war, two sides,
Speaker 1: one rope, you have to pull the other side over. Now,
Speaker 1: imagine doing that game but playing it on floating swim platforms.
Speaker 1: What Donald Trump is trying to do is pull the
Speaker 1: Harris team into the water. It doesn't matter that the
Speaker 1: Harris team is winning. It doesn't matter that they're pulling
Speaker 1: the rope towards them if they lose their balance and
Speaker 1: go into the shark confested water, which is immigration the
Speaker 1: southern border and the chaos there has dropped immensely, which
Speaker 1: in part explains why Donald Trump is talking about Haitians
Speaker 1: not Mexicans. But every time the issue is raised, underneath it,
Speaker 1: there's a debate about immigration, and that immigration debate, no
Speaker 1: matter how ransomly entered into, is something that Trump Advanced
Speaker 1: think favors them, which explains why jd. Vance says, well,
Speaker 1: it's okay for me to make this up so we
Speaker 1: can bring it to it so the voter who cares
Speaker 1: about immigration may be immunized to the lie and the sensationalism,
Speaker 1: dismiss it and say, oh, that's just Trump being Trump.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I mean, it could be happening
Speaker 1: somewhere right and we should understand. And I've written about
Speaker 1: this and I've talked about this all week. The Vice
Speaker 1: president's reaction during the debate to this was overwhelmingly the
Speaker 1: reaction that most normal people had to the absurdity of
Speaker 1: it all, but stepping back from the bluster, the shock,
Speaker 1: the buffoonery of Trump, this is a vicious, racist lie
Speaker 1: that's as vicious as anything that ever came out of
Speaker 1: the mouth of a Goebbels or a Striker. It is
Speaker 1: appalling to the exponent infinity, and it's created real danger,
Speaker 1: and it is one of the lowest and most appalling
Speaker 1: moments of the entire maggat Trump era, which always finds
Speaker 1: a way to borrow down a little deeper. The question
Speaker 1: is what's the stake for the country with another government
Speaker 1: shut down looming. Well, let's talk about the politics of it.
Speaker 1: Because we're forty six days from the election. It will
Speaker 1: hurt the Republicans. So, by all means, if they want
Speaker 1: to continue the pattern which has gone on for most
Speaker 1: of my adult life of every quarter six months threatening
Speaker 1: to shut down the government, by all means do it.
Speaker 1: Everything they do that demonstrates their unfitness for responsibility is
Speaker 1: a good thing in this moment. Politically, we don't want
Speaker 1: to see Kamala Harris have a lonely victory. It would
Speaker 1: be good to have a speaker, Jeffreys. It would be
Speaker 1: good to have a Senate majority leader, though it shouldn't
Speaker 1: be Chuck Schumer. The Vice President doesn't need to be
Speaker 1: in a war of attrition with Maga Nuts from minute
Speaker 1: one of her term. She needs a Democratic Senate, she
Speaker 1: needs a Democratic Congress, and that will give the Republican
Speaker 1: Party time to work through its many issues, which will
Speaker 1: require at some level the political equivalent or the political
Speaker 1: version of a medically induced coma. And hopefully, and even
Speaker 1: the most liberal Democrat in the country should want this.
Speaker 1: Hopefully eight years from now, ten years from now, which
Speaker 1: will come quick, there will be a healthy, normal Republican
Speaker 1: candidate again, and this Trump error will be something that
Speaker 1: everybody denies, that everybody says, who no, I wasn't for him.
Speaker 1: That's the direction. The best result we're going to get
Speaker 1: is a country that ten years from now everybody's like Trump,
Speaker 1: who yeh, no I wasn't for him? And when the
Speaker 1: people who are most forum deny him will know then
Speaker 1: fully that it's all over. The question is ken the
Speaker 1: Trump campaign distanced itself from pariahs like Laura Lumer and
Speaker 1: Mark Robinson, And the answer is no, because they're all
Speaker 1: part of the same cabal, the same cause, the same
Speaker 1: team their family, and as Trump said, this is who
Speaker 1: he thinks Mark Robinson is Martin Luther King on steroids.
Speaker 1: The question is, while I do maga Republicans continue to
Speaker 1: call for a cessation a violent re rhetoric while speaking
Speaker 1: increasingly with more violent rhetoric. What MAGA is asserting is
Speaker 1: a dogma of control. And so let's look at specifically.
Speaker 1: They're eating the pets, the Haitians are eating the dogs,
Speaker 1: eating the cats. If I can make you believe that,
Speaker 1: despite the mayor, the police chief, all of the evidence,
Speaker 1: if I can make you believe that, am I going
Speaker 1: to be able to make you believe that the election
Speaker 1: was stolen when I lose it? And the answer to
Speaker 1: that question, of course, is yes. The very first thing
Speaker 1: that happened in the Trump administration, the first thing was
Speaker 1: Sean Spicer walked out, stood behind the blue podium in
Speaker 1: the briefing room and said that Barack Obama's crowd size,
Speaker 1: which was the largest and inaugural history, was smaller than Trump's,
Speaker 1: despite their being pictures that showed Trump's was smaller than Obama's.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a lie puffering. This wasn't somebody exaggerating a
Speaker 1: bit about something they did or didn't do. It was
Speaker 1: a lie of obedience and control. There's a scene in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four at the end when Winston is being
Speaker 1: tortured and the party official holds up four fingers and
Speaker 1: says Winston, how many fingers am I holding? And Winston
Speaker 1: says four, I only see four. The party official makes
Speaker 1: the point to Winston that the answer is, however many
Speaker 1: the party tells him is the answer. So if the
Speaker 1: party holds up four fingers and says it's three, then
Speaker 1: it's three. Not in America. And so this obedience, the
Speaker 1: ability to make somebody surrender to you their problem solving skills,
Speaker 1: their intellectual agency, their sovereignty as a human, as American said,
Speaker 1: Trump will tell you, this is something that is endemic
Speaker 1: to every authoritarian cause and regime. And the big lie
Speaker 1: and the little lie come together, and we have an
Speaker 1: issue now in the country that the lie in the
Speaker 1: true truth exists in a battle space together out there
Speaker 1: on the horizon where no one can tell the difference
Speaker 1: between the two. And that is lethal in democratic governance.
Speaker 1: It's lethal because if you can't tell the truth what's real,
Speaker 1: it's not possible to have accountability. And without accountability, None
Speaker 1: of this works. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning
Speaker 1: and I invite you to join. Subscribe on our substack,
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