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