Welcome back to the Schmid storm. You got questions, I have answers. It's Thanksgiving weekend, the shopping is on, Let's get to it. The question is, will Chuck Schumer step down? Will he be forced to step down by colleagues? And if he does, is there anyone better? Yes? I think everyone is better. Almost in a democratic conference, Chuck Schumer
has to step down. I don't know of any other way to say this, but the Democratic conference of the US Senate should operate exactly like an NFL team, and Chuck Schumer is like an old feeble quarterback who's not good enough to play in the league anymore. And the reality is, and I don't mean to be brutal about this, but I don't care about his feelings. He can't do the job. And if I was a United States Senator and I was sitting in that conference meeting, I would
not be belligerent about it. I wouldn't be cruel about it. Can't do the job. And there are some things more important than Chuck Schumer's ego. So to my mind, we have just gone on this giant encirclement of the Earth, really, this giant journey, and part of it was pretending or watching people pretend and then getting yelled at by those people pretending when anybody dared to say the eighty two year old president Joe Biden was not up for the race,
and he wasn't. And that egotism and that selfishness is why we have Trump in the White House. And Schumer's no different. He's a debacle because of his political strategy, because of how he spent money, because of the chess game he has lost. There are hard no Senate seats really for Democrats to pick up in twenty twenty six. Unless Trump craters to a profound degree, all of the
action will be in the House. So getting rid of Chuck Schumer from the leadership of the party is really important for the health of the Party of New York. Voters want Chuck Schumer in there as their senator great, But the idea that in a country where Donald Trump holds immunities from the Supreme Court is the most powerful president ever. They control the Senate, they control the House, they control the Court, and the minority leader of what was once the greatest delivered a body in the world
is Chuck Schumer. He's the guy that is not the mark of a serious opposition, and what it will do is demoralize voters, demoralize activists, and it will mean each day that he's in that position that we can't get a rope up from the pit to the surface. And that sucks because it would be good to get out of the pit. The question is, will Elon Musk buy MSNBC? And if Elon Musk buys it, what will MSNBC look like?
Thanks for the question. This is really important and I predicted exactly what has transpired between Comcast and MSNBC before the election, and let me just give you a brief survey of what's happening. It has been announced that MSNBC, the Golf Channel, and a couple of other Coast cable assets are to be spun off, that they will be placed under an umbrella called spin Co, and they will
be run by an executive named Mark Lazarus. Brian Selter, the media reporter of CNN, has made the point in his column that they are not really right now in this moment for sale. Bullshit. They are for sale and they will be sold. And I'm going to tell you the reason why the price tag on the cable assets is seven billion dollars. The value the market capitalization of Comcast is one hundred and sixty four billion dollars. I think sometimes it helps to be able to think about
size comparatively. What's one hundred and sixty four billion dollars and what's seven billion? What does that look like? Well, one hundred and sixty four billion dollars is proximate to the value of the National Football League the NFL, and seven billion, right, is the value of all of these companies. So when you take out MSNBC, really what it's the
size of is the Italian Serie, a soccer league. It's a professional sport, it's got great players, but it's worth billions, not one hundreds of billions, and it's absolutely not the NFL. So Comcast looks at the Trump error, sees the promises of retribution and threats, and says, we have to dump MSNBC because they're a pancreatic cancer gene. It can kill
us the whole thing. Because Comcast exists as a cable company in a highly regulated space, and it's licensed to operate needs, it cannot be at war with a vengeful federal government that does not appreciate its cable news appendage not being nice to Trump, because the access age is giving way to the niceness age. The question of fairness in American corporate media is singular. Now are you nice to Trump? And so the CEO of Comcast isn't going
to risk it, and this will all be sold. And the Hungarian model is one that Trump and his team have talked openly about, know all about, and it calls for people like Elon Musk to buy MSNBC. I want to go through the economics of this. A lot of people look at the amount of money that Elon Musk spent one hundred and fifty million dollars on Donald Trump's behalf and think he did it for Donald Trump. He
did not. He did it for Elon Musk and Elon today after the election for a bunch of different factors. That work goes up five billion dollars one day. That covers the buy. And if Elon must buys MSNBC, he'll do to it what he did to Twitter, which is record. None of these shows will be on. Elon isn't going to put the Rachel Mattow Show on air. There won't be a Rachel Mattow Show not on MSNBC. It will
be over. It will be right wing hackery. And it's important to appreciate that only a million or so people watch most of these shows. The numbers are small. The business is failing. The morning co hosts are capitulators who've lost their credibility in the respect of their audience. When the movie Newsreels died, journalism didn't die. And if MSNBC dies, America doesn't die. Progressivism doesn't die, liberal political philosophy doesn't die.
Just MSNBC dies. The resiliency of the First Amendment is what matters in this moment. The journalism that Trump will have to deal with and that ultimately will stop him and hurt him by holding him to account, is going to be bottom up, not top down. Big corporations aren't going to be in the business of going after the most powerful person in the world who's vengeful, seeks retribution, and has all the immunity he needs to deliver it.
So truth will have to be found somewhere besides corporate America. The question is Donald Trump Junior has said that the administration has given consideration to banning corporate media. Mainstream media outlets like ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, from the White House briefing room and giving their seats away to, for example, representatives of the Joe Rogan Show. I think a couple of things about this first within a year, I think that there will be severe restrictions on the
media with regard to access to the White House. Will be very hard for mainstream media organizations to ask questions of Donald Trump. There will be outrages the White House pool operations, all all of this stuff, And I think they're going to lose out because Donald Trump's position is going to be I'm gonna do whatever I want and that ABC News doesn't have an entitlement in America that stretches beyond the one that Joe Grogan has to ask
questions for the president. So I think he's going to assemble a question asking menagerie, right, a whack pack, right, that it's really some political version of what used to surround Howard Stern, Right, you know, Donald Trump's whack pack, or will be the people in the briefing room asking questions,
which doesn't mean, of course, the journalism dies. And honestly, when is the last time an intelligent and insightful question has been asked in the White House briefing room that anybody in America out of all three hundred and thirty million of us, should give a shit about when last month, month before, how about in the last year, two, what about one time in the last three years, four years?
It's theatrics. It's a low rated conflict show. It's probably the most batal houred American life is the White House news briefing. And so Donald Trump's gonna do what he wants. He's gonna surround himself with friendly press. And I do think that Donald Trump Junior is previewing in form and fashion pretty close to what's going to happen. Question is what would John McCain think about all of this? What
would he have said about all of this? And did his death and his absence create the conditions necessary for MAGA to rise. John McCain would have fought Donald Trump NonStop every step of the way on the basis of the rottenness of his character and his degradations and indignities towards the thing that Caine revered the most, which was the code of conduct of the Armed Forces of the
United States, the traditions, the legacy of valor. He would have been deeply fronted and easily offended by everything that's gone on, he would have gone ballistic, a super nova of rage and indignation at the nomination of fools like Pete Hagsath and Tulsey Gabbard. He would have stopped them. He would have done everything he could to stop them,
would have rallied support. And I don't think that they're necessarily going to make it into their offices, but for sure they would not have if John McCain was still alive.
But beyond that, and this is not going to be politically correct, and I'm going to get in trouble, but I'm going to give an answer to the question through the pre of who I am, which is a fifty four year old dude board in New Jersey in nineteen seventy who has a particular level of contempt for the softness and the weakness and the utter lack of principle by people like Lindsay Graham. So there's a word that guys use when they talk to each other. That's not
a nice word. It's one that precedes cat and it starts with P and it's a cutting and degrading word. Toxic masculinity is sometimes used as the phrase to describe its use and all of this. And I think one of the things in this election that men, Hispanic men, black men, white men have tried to communicate to people across the country is stop with the lecturing and stop with the hectoring, and stop telling us what word we
can say and can't say. But nearly all of the Republicans, all of the sycophants around Trump, not only deserves to be called that word, they deserve to have it tattooed across their chest in a version of the Yellowstone brand. And most importantly, the person who would have been the one to most partially bestow it on them and place the brand into their chest would have been John McCain, who was many many things, but the P word was not one of them. So the truth is a watch
Morning Joe with Bob Woodward. What you're seeing is uh. And though you can't call him a he is and in the world of the Trump can trample everything in his say. And John McCain was very offended by people who are who let bullies like Trump trample over everything that they care about. And so the thing that John McCain would have thought about and the moment before he stood up to address his colleagues, castigate them, shame them,
and call them out. Is what a bunch of they were, starting with his friend Lindsey Graham, who he would have mocked, derided, shamed, laughed at, scorned, and humiliated at a level that is beyond my comprehension, that is beyond my ability to articulate, because he would have stood up in front of all the senators, ended his friendship. If Lindsey Graham acted like this and he would have said, lindsay you're a it would have fit the whole country. We would have understood it.
But tragically we can't say that word out loud anymore, and we needed it in some ways, we need it more than ever. 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.