How do you process this moment thirty four days out as Trump appears before the national media and basically says, well, I got you tamed. They all nod back at him, and you got to keep being nice. Gotta be nice, nice to Trump? How do you assess the strategic landscape politically?
I think the question is the right one because one of my great mentors is a guy named lescal who ran the Council on Form Relations, and he used to say, strategy is hard.
Most people can't do strategy. And I think what you see right.
Now is a landscape that looks like an evolving battlefield, right. And you've got a force that's on the offensive and is taking ground and got momentum and got energy, and you've got a fragment to disorganize, demoralized opposition and series of oppositions. And I think for me, I go back to being a dad, right, And when I send my boys off to school, we have little sayings every day.
I got two little boys, they're nine and five, and we say strong of body, strong of heart, strong of mind, right, And that's how I kind of steal them to think about how they can be empowered to take on whatever is gonna come at their day and I make the brothers look at each other, tell them they love them, and they go in together. Right, And every day they're going into the unknown in New York City public school.
But when my nine year old was a kindergartener, he was going into COVID with a mask and a temperature check and I couldn't even go in the room.
Right.
So I kind of bring it all back to that, Steve, because I think the most important thing for people, especially Democrats, to understand is it's on. It's been on for years and now it's fully unfolding. And for these folks that are licking their wounds or they're you know, doing with what Democrats love to do, which is like a lot of listening sessions and roundtables.
Trump is pushing his advantage very aggressively right now.
He's not taking Christmas off to handout presents to his grandkids, and.
He's going to try to run up the score.
So what's lacking is a strategy to oppose him, right, And I think what's also lacking is.
A strategic leader.
There is no Churchill, there is no FDR, and no one has yet emerged to be that person.
For the Democrats or for America.
And I've been talking to folks as I'm sure you have, who are trying to figure out what to do next to get my read and I say, look, part of it is about betting on leaders, whether you're betting on Steve Schmidt or you're betting on AOC, or you're betting on Dan Osborne who ran as an independent for Senate in Nebraska and almost one. It's not a time where the existing organizations are nimble, dynamic, or even capable enough to respond to this threat.
And I view it as a threat.
I still view it as a national security threat more than anything else. And the Trump movement now is very close to having the keys to the entire castle. But none of it is normal. None of it is and none of it is inevitable.
And what we're.
Lacking because we don't have strategic leaders, and we don't have a national strategy or even enclaves of strategies to oppose him, is we're lacking priorities, so people don't know where to focus. And that's to Trump's advantage. He wants to overwhelm the zone.
He throws.
Hegseth at you right after Gates and here comes Tulca Gabbard and RFK Junior, and nobody's even paying attention to the fact that he nominated a guy for Secretary of the Navy who's never served in the Navy, or that he's got a very radical pick at the Department of Veterans Affairs that's way below the radar and getting no coverage or even oversight. So that the strategy is to overwhelm the country, overwhelm the press, overwhelm the government, and get as much ground as he can so that the
midterms become irrelevant. Right people are stacking their chips for the midterms or for four years from now. I'm saying it's about the next thirty five days, and right now, I think the most urgent priority is heagset because he is the biggest move at the biggest agency in the federal government.
He's not inevitable.
We saw that with Gates, and I think Hegseth is the same situation. But if you're Trump and you're going for your breaking into the house, okay, whether it was your house or someone else's house, the first thing you go for is the gun closet. You go for the gun closet because it's the most dangerous, it's the most valuable, it's got all the symbolic reasons, right, and he knows that the Pentagon stopped him last time, so he's taken a long shot.
He's picking the most political, the.
Most extreme, the most not just unqualified but disqualified person to take over the largest federal agency in the government, not just because it has and the most significant, not just because it has two point seven million employees and a seven hundred billion dollar budget, but because it's the
most powerful thing that stopped him last time. Right, So, if you want to talk about things like federalizing the National Guard to rip migrant kids out of schools, if you want to talk about owning the military leadership so they don't oppose you, when you want to do any number of crazy things, the first thing you do is hit the Pentagon. And that's what he's doing. Pete Hegseth is like a political nuke strike. And if he goes through, which I don't think is gonna happen, everything else is.
Easy, right, va is cake education no problem.
You can even you know, even if he does go down, you can put up somebody like DeSantis and he sails through. So I really think it's important that people understand that Pete Hegseth was built for this moment. He was built as a culture warrior, funded by the Koch Brothers, empowered with a spot on Fox News, and we never thought that he would actually get nominated because we knew his personal life was messy. I figured he was going to be cheap of staff or maybe press secretary.
But Trump is literally saying, and he's saying you, He's I'm gonna roll you. I'm gonna put this guy up.
And he is a culture warrior, and he's got, you know, tattoos that might be associated white nationalism, and he's got three divorces, and he's openly talked about, you know, having sex with other people's wives. I mean, this is all out in the open. And if he can get heag set through, then the Democrats are going to just get rolled.
And I really think that's why, you know, I continue to bring focus towards strategic leaders that aren't political, someone like Admiral Straviti's or maybe it's a retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs like Mike Mullen.
Maybe someone else will emerge. I don't have an answer for you.
But I do think that independent Americans, especially people who do put country first, people who took off the uniform, especially veterans who want to continue to serve but don't necessarily want to get in politics. This is a time for true patriots to step up and defend our values. Whether you're a school teacher that has to represent yourself at the school board, or you're somebody who's been thinking about running for Senate, you know, maybe this is your time.
But at the end of the day, he wants to roll everybody. And I think that's the most important point about December twenty twenty four going into January, is he wants to come out with a.
Head of steam. This is like a blitzkree. He's putting it all up front.
He wants to push it through because once he gets the keys to not just the gun closet at the kitchen and the security system and everything else, then everything else becomes easier. So I think it's really important that you lay out that landscape where we can't count on the Democrats. I've never been been counting on the Democrats.
I don't think you have either, But I think it's kind of a wake up moment for America to go, hey, they're not going to fucking save you here, and we have to look to other leaders and other structures and other tactics and to have a strategy on a very basic level to defend our values, defend our constitution.
And let's start with defending our.
Military from a guy who says he doesn't want women in combat when we've got two hundred thousand women in combat and.
Has all this other shit.
Let's start with focusing on Pete hagg Seth and not all the other shiny stuff, because this is a very important fight, and it's the fight that is right in front of us, and we'll dictate I think the pace for everything else for years to come.
I want to talk about Pete Hagsath. That was a lot to throw at you when we start.
No, no, indeed, and I agree, I agree, I agree with you. Obviously, he is unfit at such a profound and deep level. It's tough to find the words. I'm gonna do my best as we get, as we get, as we get into it. But but I want to I want to play Devil's advocate to you about something that I think is fundamental that we we got to put on the table and talk about more in the country, which is an honest reckoning about how we have arrived at this situation. In the military, as you as you know,
after every action there's gonna be an after action review. Uh, it's important to have an appreciation right of how it is they arrived at whatever situation one finds oneself in in order to get out of it, right and and and so in that sense, let me ask you a couple a couple things. Is it possible that Pete Hegseth could be worse in that position than Donald Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara were.
Thousand percent yes, okay, absolutely, totally and completely. How because on a very basic level you may have disagreed with McNamara or Rumsfeld on policy right like whether.
To bomb Cambodia, whether to stay in Iraq.
This is compromising the entire integrity of the establishment. It's it's making it a political wing of Trump's agenda. And I think that's why this is very important, right because everything that Trump wants to get done on everything from migrants to banning trans people, right the entire spectrum of his agenda will start with Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon. Right, So let's use an example that that is maybe you know, maybe not a great one, but maybe like trans people's rights.
Right day one, at the Pentagon, they flip the switch, there's a trans band. Anybody who's trans gets pulled out of a unit, you get kicked out of the military, you get processed out, and we start there.
Right.
It is going to be easier at the Pentagon than the Department of Justice or the Department.
Of Labor, or at education or at home.
The Depentagon is going to be the fulcrum for everything because it will be present presented as a position on national security. If we don't do this, the Chinese will have an advantage. If we don't do this, our enemies will be at an advantage. Right, And that's going to be true for trans bands, that's going to be true for activating the national card.
I want to say that as a political argument, Okay, if you lead with we have to protect national security by opposing Trump's trans band on day one, right, this is this is the first thing we're running at.
I'm using that as an example because it's because it's the easiest one for him, right, and it's what he ran on, right, it's what he ran on, it's what he weaponized, it's what he used as as kind of a boogeyman.
Right to me, Right, you Trump is going to impose a ban on all transgender service members. They're going to be honorably discharged. And there's nothing not honorably not anybody can do to stop that. Well, they'll be generally generally discharged.
They'll probably be dishonorably discharge or at least general discharge. They probably won't get benefits. And this is why it's important, right because in some ways you could argue that trans people are the most vulnerable, or the weakest or the most politicized. Right, so you you start with them, right, And so when you want to do something like take women out of combat, which which is bigger than it seems, because what it is is it's saying women are not equal. Right,
women are not equally that's the bottom line. You can't do the same things that we do, and therefore you will not have this same opportunities, rights, etc. So if you succeed in achieving a lack of equality for women at depentagon, abortion rights, everything else is a downhill slide from there. So when you ask me, is he more dangerous than McNamara or Rumsfeld? You know, yes, because the
agenda is much more extreme. I would argue that you could at least count on Rumsfeld on some levels to put country over party.
Right.
He may have agreed with his allegiances or his politics, but I think on a basic level there was some kind of integrity there around the institution and the world wasn't as dangerous Steve. I mean, we've got, you know, a land war in Eastern Europe. We've got the Chinese threat of Taiwan. We've got all these other threats that are real but also in a position to be exaggerated, not just by Trump but by Hegseth, who I think
too many Democrats dismissed these people. Hegseth is a masterful communicator. He is brilliant at doing this, at selling, at communicating, at motivating people. And he's a multi sport athlete who can go on Joe Rogan, but can host a show on Fox and also entangle with the reporters on Capitol Hill and spin a weakness into his strength. And that's why this is the playbook for the rest of the administration. Right, It's the same kind of skill set Tulsey Gabbert has.
You could argue it's the same kind of skill set other people in the cabinet, how even like someone like a Christy Nome.
But they're good on TV.
They're able to communicate to people, you know, foreign and domestic, and.
They're good at this. They're good at this thing. You may not like the thing, but they are very very good at it.
And if you have a pete Hegsev controlling everything from our nukes to who gets to join right, that drives the culture for the entire country. So if you don't understand why Joe Rogan is important, you probably don't understand why the Pentagon's so important. And that's the parallel that I think democrats and many liberals in this country are really failing to understand.
It's much bigger than about politics.
It's about culture and manipulating American pagetriotism into something much more nefarious.
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.