It is December the ninth. Forty two days remain until the noon hour, when Donald Trump will once again hold within his hands the power of armageddon. He will again be the commander in chief, the American head of state, the forty seventh President of the United States, and he will be the most powerful president in American history, the first to have immunity, the first to be a king
by another name. And Donald Trump has already started abusing his power by nominating, disrespectfully, some of the most unfit people who have ever been forwarded to the United States Senate for consideration for their advice and consent for deadly jobs, life and death positions, the ones that speak to the safety of the nation. This is the warning. Two days ago we celebrated an anniversary in this country Pearl Harbor.
There are sixteen survivors left, sixteen who are alive at Pearl Harbor on that day when there was a massive intelligence failure. We remember September eleventh, two thousand and one, another massive intelligence failure, and we must recall when we ponder the fall of Assad in Syria and the devastating impact this will have on Russian and Iranian ambitions in the region. The question must be asked, why was Tulsea
Gabbard in Syria with Basher Ali Sad? Why was Donald Trump's Director of National Intelligence nominee so easily duped like Vanity Fair magazine was in twenty twelve by the Assad regime propaganda machine. Soon there will be an opportunity, no doubt, to review the files and the archives that are uncovered that might explain what it is that Tulsi Gabbard was doing in Syria, and what it is that the Syrians thought about Tulsi Gabbard, maybe even what the Russians thought
about their useful idiot. Do you know that every night on Russian state television Tulsi Gabbard is celebrated as our girl. Honest to God, it's not because she's a paid agent. She's likely not smart enough. It's because she's such a stupefyingly effective, useful idiot. She went from uttering inanities and banalities on Fox to being the nominee for the office of Director of National Intelligence. You see, the Iranians and the Russians, whose empire of malice is falling apart, have
one ace up their sleeves. Donald Trump, the one man who can deliver to them victory from the edge of defeat. Because of his ignorance about the world, how it functions, and his incompetence, these will be deadly years around the world.
Have no doubt about that. And the man that Donald Trump has put forward to lead the Pentagon to be the person who sits atop a command authority that includes five thousand plus nuclear weapons, A drunk and accused rapist, a man whose nomination has come now to rely on his mother, who is calling senators, making visits with him, and doing appearances on television saying he is not, in fact the low rent abuser of women that his own
mother condemned him as which he is. How can we ask our young men and women to raise their hand and to serve and have such carelessness, such disrespect for their service, that the United State Senate would dare to nominate and approve this man to sit atop a civilian command structure beneath only the President of the United States. The evidence of his drunkenness, of his debauched behavior is significant.
In fact, he seems to be the Republican version of Hunter Biden, a man without morals, a man without judgment and a man with a huge substance abuse problem only possibly exceeded by his entitlement. Would Republicans vote to make Hunter Biden the Secretary of Defense, then why would they make Pete Hegseth the Secretary of Defense. Tolsey Gabbert like Cash Pttel, like Pete Hegseth, like Robert Kennedy, like Christy Nome is unfit, unfit for service. But most of these
people will make it through. A couple of them must not. And high on that list is the FBI director Designant Cashpitel. Cash Ptel is a joke. Let's watch the future FBI director of Trump's fantasies sell some product.
We are a bestseller in the Wall Street Journal, Amazon, all these other bestseller lists, and we sold that. We met the metrics to be a New York Times bestseller. But at the end of the day, the Times decides if you get on that list, even if you meet the metrics for sales. And so you know, maybe I'm kind of glad I'm not a New York Times bestseller because they won't give it to me.
Planes fly into buildings when these people fail in their jobs. Serial killers get away. When this agency fails in its job, and this clown and grifter and huckster is unfit, as unfit as Mac Gates, as unfitted as Pete hake Seth, as unfit as Taulsey Gabbard. Yet so many in the media are covering Donald Trump like, well, he's a normal fella.
Let's watch this instant from Meet the Press where Donald Trump makes clear that the Congress, a committee of a co equal branch of government doing oversight, impaneled to investigate his coup, his violent insurrection, that it is those people who tried to find the truth and published an eight hundred page report about what he did.
And Cheney was behind it, and so is Benny Thompson and everybody on that committee. We're going to for what they did, yeh. Honestly, they should go to jail.
So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail for what everyone on the committee.
Used, I think everybody anybody that voted in.
Funy, those people should be locked up. While the people who stormed the capitol, the criminals who vandalized it, who assaulted police officers, including the violent ones, will all be pardoned on day one. And these people will come out of prison and they will be maga martyrs. Many will run for office, Some will be elected to office, but their extremism will have paid off for them. Many of them will wind up with government appointments, no doubt, heroes forevermore.
The men and women who have been called upon by their leader did something no group of Americans have ever done. They stormed the capital after a presidential election and tried to burn the Constitution to keep their orange tinted demigod from reality television in power for a job he failed at morally, mentally, and spiritually. The worst president in American history was the forty fifth president, but the forty seventh
is going to pass him early in his term. When we think about retribution and revenge and all that is coming, the American media is falling down, failing in the moment, none more spectacularly than Joe Scarborough and Mika Brazinski. The exact and precise moment the country needs truthtellers looking into cameras. What they're getting is capitulation. What they're getting is the
bending of the knee. What they're getting is appeasement. And there is no place where this is playing out more perversely, more dramatically than at the six o'clock hour on MSNBC when Joe Scarborough and Mika Brazinski sit down. The justifications have not stopped for weeks, and Joe Scarborough completely lost it on his audience on Friday morning, rebuking them, reprimanding them, the people he called family just days before.
Do you know why I went to leaders in the Middle East who were angry at the United States and I sat there and I listened to them attacking me personally for forty five minutes because of US policy. You know why I do that? To get the read of the leader, to get the read of where the country's going. So I can come back here and talk to you and let you know what the hell is going on
with context and give you context, insight and background. You know, everybody we have on the show that's a reporter, it's what they do every day. They speak on background.
Let me suggest, if you're watching the show, you're not part of Joe and Mika's family. You're strangers. Actually, you're just someone trying to get some facts in the morning. And if you do feel a connection, well you should appreciate about that connection because there's no room for you in the Joe and Mika bus, the escape bus from mar A Lago. And I'm not joking around here. What we've seen from them is a form of cowardice, a form of panic. Nothing's happened yet, but they're flailing in
the water already. Why are these people terrified about Donald Trump and his bluster? They are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Donald Trump wants people afraid, he wants people intimidated. There is no basis for his threats to jail his opponents. His power is immense, but because this is America, it can be opposed unless people are
too intimidated to oppose it. And the problem with this moment is the people who are intimidated are the richest and most powerful, with the biggest microphones and the largest platforms. They're afraid of losing what they have, and because of that, they'll tell you not what you need to hear, but what the person who can take from them wants you to hear. When you look around in the years to come, there's but a single question that you have to have
the wisdom to process who is on your side. And no, it's not necessarily a person who has the magic letter E next to their name. Maybe they're also in it for themselves, maybe they're looking to get as much as
they can get. And what you're going to have to figure out in the years ahead as the Trump presidency unfolds and the catastrophe reveals itself, is who out there will step up and run for office genuinely cares about reform and renewal and not about victory for themselves in the moment, but victory for the country a generation from now. Who's the person who wants to fight on your side against the most powerful interest in the world to preserve the best idea in the history of the world, America.
We have crossed the line. Elon Musk is functioning as a type of unelected deputy president, the richest man in the world, the first American oligarch, powerful in business, powerful in culture, and powerful politically beyond any measure, beyond comprehension. We'll see how it plays out. Donald Trump's cabinet is the richest and the wealthiest and the most out of
touch in all of American history. Each of them, with a billion dollars worth of zeros next to their name, believes because of that they are a genius, and together they are a supernova of genius, trumpy and genius that will make America great again by taking as much as they can get their hands on and sprinkling it out as they see fit. Their beneficence, you see, is a part of their genius. All the rest of us are but cogs and pieces in the grand and great contraption
and machine they're rigging for them. This will all fall apart, and it's going to be very very ugly. Tremendous damage will be done to our institution, to our society. We're going to see cracks in the foundation. And even though so much of what we have seen over the last decade has been troubling, has been disturbing, has been shattering of a lot of preconceptions, none of it has yet really begun. The thing to remember is that Donald Trump,
while being a terrible president, was a consequential one. But his consequential era is just getting started. Let's say the book of Donald Trump will one day be one thousand pages long. The apprentice chapters in his first term will be less than one hundred. The future and what Trump will be remembered for hasn't happened yet, but when it does, we will all remember it, and everyone around the world will also for a very very long time. Donald Trump
has power, and so does MAGA. The Democratic Party has suffered a failure that it will take a long time, judging by the responses from the people who led that failure to get their heads around it, the flawless campaign of twenty twenty four, According to Kamala Harris's chief of staff, well, that flawless campaign has given us our first flawless president, Donald Trump, our first king since George the Third, our first commander in chief resolutely above the rest of us
because he is above the law. Let's be clear about that. The fiction that we're all equal under it, that's over in America. It's not true, but it could be true if we elect the right people in. Those people in the next years are going to have to be smart and nimble and serious in. Those people are going to have to be tough in principled in. Those people are going to have to refuse to back down. And the truth is those people are going to have to take
some risks. Before this is all over. These early days of the second Trump presidency will not be remembered. They will all fade out. Pete Hegseth will not make it to the Pentagon, and he won't be remembered. What will is what happens when Donald Trump's team takes command, and then over four years time, a great drama will unfold. Some people think that in the end good things will happen. I pray that those people are right, but I know in my heart that they are not, because life does
not work that way. Life is hard, and it's tough, and there are consequences for people and for nations. There is a prayer carved into the marble above the fireplace in the State Dining Room. It was an admonition from John Adams, and it was a prayer that none but good and wise men would ever live under the roof
of the White House. We've never had a perfect president, had some brilliant ones, we've had some corrupt ones, but we've never had a president who the Supreme Court has made a caesar who carries in his heart a malice for everybody who opposes him, and a disrespect for the institutions that constrain him, and a rage against the idea that he can be told no, the days ahead are going to be very hard in this country, and the resistance to it is going to have to be something
that forms outside of Washington, because Washington is not a place where you will find opposition to Trump. It is a place where the accommodation begins. Just like on the set of Mourning Joe. This is the warning. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning, and I invite you to join. Subscribe on our sub stack, on our YouTube channel, follow us. Welcome to the community.