It is the seventeenth of July. It is the third day of the Republican National Convention, the night where vice presidential nominee Ohio Senator JD. Vance will take to the podium to celebrate the life and times of the man who, just a few short years ago, he said, was America's Hitler. This is the warning. Last night's disgrace at the Republican National Convention gave the whole world and all of America's
children an abject lesson in the qualities of debasement. There are few better shining examples of what it means to debase yourself than what Nicki Haley and Ron DeSantis did last night. Let's, in the words of that great former sportscaster Warner Wolf, go to the videotape and let's watch Nicki Haley tell you what she thought about Donald Trump.
President Trump asked me to speak to this convention in the name of unity. It was a gracious invitation and I was happy to accept. I'll start by making one thing perfectly clear. Donald Trump has my strong endorsement.
Period.
Now let's listen to Ron DeSantis.
Donald Trump has been demonized, He's been sued, he's been prosecuted, and he nearly lost his life. We cannot let him down, and we cannot let America down.
It's very important to remember that Donald Trump attacked Nikki Haley's husband, attacked his military service, subjected her family to abject cruelty. But yet this broken woman is up there on the stage celebrating the leader. I suppose this is what Donald Trump means when he talks about unity through debasement. The abandonment of any principle, any conviction, is clearly how you get ahead, how you climb the greasy pole of
the parties in American politics. It is astonishing we have eradicated a demand for character in our society, in our country. What preposterous equal these are. Now, I'll say this about Donald Trump, who I am no fan of to say the least, but at least Donald Trump would never debase himself for another person. He would never lie down and lick Ron De Santis's feet like Ron De Santis does Trump's.
He just wouldn't. He doesn't have it in him. And I guess in some way that's admirable because witnessing Nikky Haley and Ron De Santis was stomach turning. What we are witnessing in this moment in time is a collision of cowardice and cynicism, diffusion of the two into some type of nuclear like energy that is irradiating our democracy and killing it. If the political leaders of the country literally believe in nothing, will say anything, do anything for
a bit of attention in the spotlight, we're doomed. Jd. Vance is a first rate fraud and he is a first rate political extremist. His views are repugnant and dangerous. JD. Vance does not believe in democracy. He has called for an American Caesar. He has said that in order to defend freedom, we have to lessen our commitment to democracy.
It's the exact same argument that Adolf Hitler made. Democracy was a threat to freedom because some people you see are unequal because they are lesser than, and those lesser than people who get to vote equally, are stealing something from the true Americans. It's an evil ideology and it should be treated as such. JD. Vance rose on the patronage of a weirdo billionaire named Peter Teele. And when
I say weirdo, I mean weirdo. This is a guy who talks about sea steading that new nations should be created out of shipping containers strung together on floating islands. It's nonsense. Peter Keiel accepted citizenship in New Zealand, yet he still is involved enough to spend tens of millions on JD Vance's political campaign. Now. The Republican National Convention has been an exquisite clinic thus far, in its preliminary
nights of weirdness and debasement. When you sit back, if you can lower the partisan temperature, take out your partisanship, just remove it, pretend even if you disagree with Nikki Haley that she's right on every single issue. Can you imagine getting up and giving a speech where everybody, and I mean everybody knows how full of shit you are.
Can you imagine going and turning on the television when you get back to your hotel room watching the speech, and the pleasure, the sadism of the look on Trump's face as you debase yourself, humiliate yourself, the lack of dignity, the abject weakness. Ron DeSantis is a delusional man and truly one of the worst political candidates of all time who ran for national office, who ran one of the
pathetic and worst political campaigns of all time. But in this age of delusion, Ron DeSantis believes he's a future president and he will never be because Maga loves strength, and those two have been defenestrated beyond any ability of mind to conceivably explain the weakness oozes from them out of every or debasement, weakness, submission, a surrender of intellectual agency.
These are the requirements to be a good Maga. No thanks, I reject that unity, and so should you, because when the media talks about we need unity in America and they don't explain that unity on Trump's terms means debasement and submission to every idea that Trump has at the expense to the ideas and ideals our fathers and mothers died defending and nurturing for two hundred and forty eight years. No,
we must not, and we will not. The President Joe Biden has some deep thinking to do because his campaign increasingly looks like a suicide mission headed straight at an iceberg, and the strategy seems to be that weak and cowardly people who won't tell truth to power feel invigorated to scream at the rest of us that we did not see what we saw and that the polling numbers that are real are not as a kareem down a pathway of national catastrophe. Tonight, j D Vance takes the stage
and the main event will be close at hand. There's been no person as manifestly unfit for national office standing behind a podium speaking to a national convention since Sarah Palin. He's like Sarah Palin, except smarter, as deeply cynical, a lot more stable, and deeply deeply and I mean deeply ambitious. He's the Republican nominee for vice president. That's a terrifying thing.
And let me say something else. The decision to remove Joe Scarborough and Mika Brazenski from the air by Rashida Jones, the MSNBC president, and Caesar Conda, the NBC President, was a despicable act. And more importantly, it was an act of cowardice, not journalism, cowardice. And you should understand this is exactly how freedom erodes when Donald Trump becomes president in November. It's a phone call and it's only a few people. What Jones and Conda were terrified of was
offending Donald Trump. They were afraid of offending a presidential candidate in the wake of an assassination. They were afraid that somebody might say the wrong thing. But you know what, this is the United States, and there are no rights to not be offended, and certainly the most powerful people in the world don't get to regulate what offense is. No, these people, after hiring Rona Romney McDaniel, did not not learn any lessons. In fact, they've just revealed themselves more.
And they may be wonderful business people, but they have no business running a news operation in a moment where freedom of the press is about to be tested like it has never been in the modern era of the country. The Washington Post says democracy dies in darkness. It doesn't democracy dies when The Washington Post has a publisher who deleted thirty million emails. Cynicism is strangling faith in the most glorious traditions of our freedom. It's killing idealism in
this country. It's killing principle, it's killing conviction, and we must stop it. There will be a new cause that arises from Trump's ascendency, and that cause will be one that must be nonviolent and represents the best traditions of American justice and liberty and freedom. The Warning will speak to that cause. Always join us, be part of this community. Understand what's happening around you, keep your eyes open. This is an hour where all of us must be wide awake.
I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the Warning and I invite you to join. Subscribe on our substack, on our YouTube channel, follow us. Welcome to the community.