Seven hundred and nineteen days from now we get a vote, a referendum on the first two years of the Trump presidency and on the corrupt MAGA rubber stamp Congress. This is the warning Donald Trump is off to a fast start assembling his cabinet. The Democratic Party is in no real functional position to oppose all of them, particularly given the resounding victory Donald Trump achieved in the election last week. Yet the American people and the Trump opposition are on
the edge of an extremely important moral victory. When all of the votes are cast, it seems that Donald Trump will not have a majority support of the American people. He will be a plurality winner, and the scale and the size of his victory will be less than what George W.
Bush achieved when he beat.
John Kerry by one hundred and forty one thousand votes in the state of Ohio, becoming the nation's forty third president. We should talk about the man that he picked to be Secretary of Defense, because when he was picked, Donald Rumsfeld, who had at one point been the youngest secretary in the nation's history, was celebrated. He went on to become the worst defense secretary in American history by a lot.
He was the principal architect of two losing wars that killed a million human beings, five thousand plus of them Americans, wounded tens of thousands, incited a suicide epidemic, and cost four trillion dollars. The arrogant Rumsfeldt sent the first cavalry division to Bagdad without its armor. He mandated that the United States Army fight a war of ideology on the basis not of doctrine, not on training, but the whims of rumsfeld ego.
And it was a disaster.
And now Donald Trump has raised the anti He has appointed somebody to become the Secretary of Defense, a National Guard officer and Princeton graduate with no real world experience outside of Fox News, to become the leader of the trillion dollar a year Department of Defense, which cannot pass an audit. Pete Hegseeth will be taking the place of
Lloyd Austin, a competent, decent, qualified man. Pete Hegseth, a man who believes women should not be in combat, a tinkerer with the codes and customs of the military, trying to impose the MAGA worldview on its system of honor, including his demand that war criminals be pardoned by Donald Trump, who violated the most important codes and mores of the military. When the Navy Seals wanted to take Eddie Gallagher's tried in a way, Pete Heegsath was there to politicize it,
to foxify it. And now he'll be the Secretary of Defense unless Democrats can stop him, and he should be target Numero Uno for the confirmation hearings. Democrats should demand immediately the full release of his service files, all of them. What were his fitness reports? The simple fact is, I'm not somebody who believes that the personal lives of leaders should be a disqualification. But the simple truth is Pete Hegsath is on his third marriage and two times he's
had affairs with coworkers. Adultery is a crime in the military. Pete Hegsath is a clown who has no business leading the American armedforces. Democrats should fight this all the way home.
The American people love their dogs, me included. There is no maga whatever who is quite like Corey Lewandowski's mistress, Governor Christy Noam of South Dakota, who is to be the Secretary of Homeland Security because in the way that Trump is a narcissist, it appears that Christie Nome is a sadist in her own words, with her own confessions, She's a small state governor who is not competent to the task of running America's bloated homeland security behemoth. Christi
nom will do whatever Trump tells her to do. Will she take away people's tsa pre because she doesn't like their politics or their Nexus cards or global traveler cards? Who gets to be on the no fly list Democratic committeemen. With Trump's reign of revenge set to fall upon the country, Christie Nome is going to have a hard time answering tough questions and a confirmation and Democrats should go after
her heart with discipline and focus. Fact that the matter is the Democratic Party right now is not in fighting shape, but it has to, like a wolf pack or a lion pack, go after the weakest members of the Trump heard That's how zebras get eaten. And the slowest zebras in Trump's Maga pack are Pete Hegseth and Christy No. They're extremely vulnerable and they have been nominated for some of the most important offices in the country Now the grifting former governor of Arkansas and Fox News host Mike.
Huckabee has been nominated to be ambassador to Israel.
That's a joke, not unsuspected, but Democrats should do everything they can to embarrass this man because he deserves it. During his confirmation hearings, he's a political extremist who will go to the Middle East, to a place of tension in a time of war and say manifestly stupid things that will inflame the situation and get people killed. Now, most people don't remember how corrupt Mike Huckabee was when
he was the governor of Arkansas. I shit you not, but he released the equivalent as governor of a wedding registry where you could send the governor gifts for the governor's mansion, and of course Huckabee pocketed all of them. We never really got to talk about it on the McCain campaign because it wasn't our political interest.
But one of my long lost.
Regrets is that we never really got to mix it up with Mike Couckabee and call this clown and fool and liar and grift or out for what he is. One of the worst Americans out there. Truly, and so the confirmation process for Mike Cookabee should not be courteous. It should be brutal. Every one of the Trump grits who comes before the Congress should get it with both barrels, because that's the job of the Congress, not to rubber
stamp Trump's most obnoxious picks. And by the way, let's talk about the co presidents, the conspiracy theorist vvak Ramaswami and Elon Musk. Together they will be reinventing government, leading the government Efficiency Office. As Senator Elizabeth Warren points out, why not an efficiency office? The job of one person will now be run by two giant egos, the South African Elon Musk and vvak Ramaswami, the nine to eleven conspiracy theorists.
What could go wrong?
They probably aren't up to the task. And that's okay because sooner or later, no matter how inept the Democratic Party is, Donald Trump and his team of nut jobs will be undone. By the combination of their incompetence, their arrogance, and their streams. They will trip themselves up. That it would be good if a decent opposition formed as quickly as possible. That was tough, that was focused and was
brutally honest. And what that means is it's time to discard all of the grifters and all of their groups that raise money from senior citizens promising to be centurions of democracy while pocketing ninety eight cents on the dollar. It ought to be illegal, and it probably is. But here's the thing. A decent opposition is what is required to beat Donald Trump. A mirror image opposition will lose to him every time because the.
Small time grifters of the.
Resistance movement are nothing compared to the big time grifters, the big sharks of the Maga movement. A decent opposition stealed by conviction and fortitude will have a great victory seven hundred and nineteen days from now if it is built on a foundation of principle and conviction, in fierceness in defense of the Constitution from the attack and assault that it's about to sustain. An election was lost that
shouldn't have been. But everybody who is part of the movement that stands opposed to Donald Trump as a matter of conviction and conscience can be certain that they are on the right side of history because they are on the side that believes all Americans are created equal, that they have inalienable rights, that we should not bow to a king or a caesar, and that nobody has the right to persecute any American for speaking out with regard to what they think, what they believe, or the faith
they have.
To threaten to do so is un American.
And though it was given a mandate by the American people, the American people are fickle, and soon Donald Trump will have full control of the entire government, and the American people will get to see what MAGA looks like in twenty twenty four. They're going to get to see incredible brutality. They're going to get to see in humanity. They're going to get to see a repudiation of our exceptionalism as a country, our excellence as a people. It's going to
be a shameful period sad one. It requires, in this moment, tough and focus people who can tell the truth, who can rally people to a cause and communicate something better than what Donald Trump is capable of. If that is done, then victory is not so far off. If it is not, and terrible things will happen, and the situation will worsen. It's time to start talking about and to start thinking about better, and the first step to that means letting go of the past.
And that past includes.
A lot of failed democratic leaders who's incompetence purchased us four years of Donald Trump. Every one of you who sees this should be outraged over it, but that outrage cannot deter you from participation and the work of fighting back and taking back one house of government and then a second. This is the work at hand. The country's future depends on it. Quitting, tuning out, disengaging at the moment of maximum danger when MAGA has maximum power is
simply not an option. It will make everything worse and all of us less safe. A great contest is underway, and its end result is unclear. Donald Trump has won two elections and lost one. The midterm elections between did not break his way. He will not have achieved a majority, and the country is closed divided. The next rounds in this fight are undecided. Let's get back to work. There's much to be done. This is the warning. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning, and I invite you to join.
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